You are Princess Celestia, and right now you are having a very interesting conversation.
"And thanks to your patronage, Princess Celestia, the new wing at the hospital will be more than sufficient to accommodate all of our patients," the old pony says, his hoofs clearly working hard to keep up with you although you are already walking slowly. "Me and my staff can't thank you enough, Princess. Truly."
It is still morning, but you have been up for a while now. A corner of your mind is still worried that Luna did not manage to lower the moon properly, but you are more than grateful that you heard her march back into her room and, hopefully, to bed.
There had been days when she simply stayed in the balcony, looking at the horizon, and she would not budge until you carried her away from the spot. There had been days when she simply flew away and…
Well, you hope that those days are all well behind you now.
Your sister is getting better. You know it.
"It is my pleasure Inky Hoofs," you retort to the pony, "after all, although Equestria might be a peaceful place, we absolutely cannot neglect the kind of treatment that you and your students provide."
"It fills me with happiness to hear somepony of your station say this," he says, and you can feel the honesty in his voice, "it makes an old horse like me feel like I just got my cutie mark all over again."
You give him a smile, and the two of you stop as you finally reach the doors that lead to the dining hall.
"Would you care to join me for breakfast, Inky Hoofs?" you ask tentatively, "I'd like to say once again that I am sorry that we could only meet so early in the morning, but we could continue our conversation if you joined me for a meal."
"Hah! I wont fall for this trap again, Princess!" he replies, starting to chuckle as he speaks, "last time I accepted your invitation, I ended up in the middle of a dispute between the Bluebloods and the Greenhoofs. And I mean literally in the middle, they were practically throwing food at each other during their argument".
"Yes I remember," you laugh with him.
"And don't mind about the time, you're a Princess for goodness sake! I should be the one apologizing for taking up your precious minutes."
And with that Inky Hoofs part ways with you, but not before thanking you a few more times. You watch him go as he leaves, politely escorted by a guard since you honestly worry that he might fall down at any moment, and you can't help but to look at his cutie mark when he turns at a corner, like you always do.
A pen next to a scroll, and a long red couch. You think that kind of couch is named a shezlong…? Well, whatever it is, it is terribly fitting, as cutie marks usually are.
You turn back towards the great door that leads to the dining hall. This door is always left unguarded, at least during this time of the day, and you make sure that it is kept like that for a very good reason.
Your dining hall is a war zone, there is no other way to describe it. And these doors, at this time of the morning, are the final threshold between you and another arduous day.
It has been centuries now that almost every single moment of your day is planned and counted, sometimes down to the very second, and it has been centuries now that you have given up even your meals so you could attend more meetings or take care of more issues.
You know that as soon as you open that door your entrance will be declared, and dozens of very well-dressed ponies will get up from their chairs as they wait for you to be seated.
Kibitz is right there, on the other side of the door. He always is. You swear you can hear his watch ticking, and you just know that he is looking at it, counting down how many minutes less you will have to walk from the courtyard to the throne room if you "keep taking so long to attend a single breakfast" like he always says.
But you have not opened that door yet. This is your tiny rebellion against the day ahead of you, the small moment of peace of mind that you allow yourself every morning.
You take a deep breath, and stare up at the tall door, taller even than you are. You are never quite sure of how your expression is like during these few seconds. Are you calm and collected? Are you perhaps dreading the day that is about to start? Do you perhaps look tired?
You are never quite sure, and you do not want to think about what sorts of rumors and unease would spread the castle if you were to be seen during this moment.
So this is why you order that there be no guards on this particular spot, at this particular time of the day.
Your horn starts to glow, but you do not reach for the door just yet. Instead, you bring out the scroll that Inky Hoofs gave you earlier this morning. The latest part of his work that he came to deliver personally, together with his thanks for your investment on his work.
You unseal it and check the title, nodding with satisfaction at what you see.
"A Treatise On Survivor's Guilt, As Observed From The Aftermath Of The Fire On Cloudy Grove Village."
"By I. Hoofs."
You have picked up a few things along the centuries. Far less than you thought you would, in all honesty, since ruling consumes almost every hour of your every day. But psychology was one of them, one of those skills that you knew would be useful since most of your time is spent dealing with ponies. Having your age also helps, of course, since you have already seen every kind of pony across generations.
But, you think as you eye the scroll one last time, right now you have every reason to want to brush up on this particular field.
You fold the scroll back and storage it in your wing, a trick you know that pegasus can't really pull off due to sheer size, and then you reach for the door with your magic, the door glowing in return with the golden light that irradiates from your horn.
"May the illustrious guests please rise," you hear Kibitz's prim and proper voice echo down the dining hall, "Princess Celestia will now grace us with her presence."
You will make sure to read it tonight, you think, preferably after watching your dear sister raise the moon without a hitch.
But for now, a new day begins for you.
- - -
You have been trying to ignore it for some time now, just going with the flow of the conversation around you.
"… but then I said, raincloud taxing is now measured by the amount of raindrops per second!" the elegantly dressed pegasus laughs at his own story, soon being joined by those around him.
Some of them look your way and you offer them a polite smile, a perfectly faked chuckle, as if you were paying attention the whole time, and this causes their laugh to become more relaxed, more honest, the pegasus who had just told the story smiling at the small measure of approval he gained just now.
But in truth you have no idea of what they were talking about. In fact, you have no idea of what is happening at all around the table. You are usually capable of accompanying every conversation without conscious effort, of guiding the tone of the ponies around you, fishing for political intrigue at the same time that you make sure to dissolve tensions before they are even borne.
You have centuries of statesmanship to draw experience from, but for some reason you just cannot focus at all.
There is this sensation that you are having… some sort of high pitched ringing in your head that you have no idea of what could be the cause. Maybe one of your ears is going bad? You haven't seen a doctor in decades, after all. Or maybe some sort of magic is going haywire in some distant place? You recall something like that happening a few centuries back, a very similar feeling heralding a small disaster by a rogue unicorn mage.
Maybe it's another Sonic Rainboom? There was one a few years ago and this… no, nevermind, you are sure that the sensation was not like this.
No, this is literally a ringing, slightly growing in volume and intensity with every minute.
It has actually reached the point where it is a bit
painful now. Your expression fails for a few moments as a sudden wince inside your head gets you by surprise, the movement catching the attention of quite a few nobles.
Although that escapes your attention. You are too focused now, concentrating on that almost physical sound that went from subtle to maddening in but a few minutes.
You realize, as you focus on it, that it is not an actual noise. It is a feeling, of sorts, but one that runs deeper than normal… something that you know that should be very familiar, but that you haven't felt in such a long time that…
You get up from your seat, eyes open wide and hoofs banging at the table, the sound of your chair scraping through the floor instantly causing everypony present to go silent. The nobles all look at you, suddenly worried, but you do not care.
Something is very wrong.
You look around, not really focusing on anything, your whole attention on that feeling inside of your head as you start walking towards the door that leads to the exit. You think you hear the nobles whispering, confused as to what is happening, you think you hear Kibitz following behind you, asking you something.
But you do not care. You start trotting, then running, then galloping, your old and aged majordomo being left behind before long.
You don't know where you are running to, you just let your hoofs guide you as you fly past servants and visitors and confused guards, but soon enough you realize where you are heading. And then you take over the semi-conscious efforts of your hoofs, a chill running through your spine as you open your wings and jump out of the nearest window. You were scaling the stairs that lead to yours and Luna's personal accommodations, so there can only be one thing that is causing this foreboding
thing inside your head.
Your heart starts beating faster in your chest as you touchdown on your sister's balcony, a crack on the marble fence that you notice causing you to swallow something dry. But you don't even break your stride, trotting towards the glass door that leads to her room as soon as your hoofs touch the ground, levitating the heavy curtains away from your path as you enter her dark-blue painted room.
"Lu…" you whisper hesitantly as you enter, looking around with the glow of your horn.
"Luna?" she is right there, you can see her. A pony-shaped lump under the sheets, crowned by the silhouette of her horn.
She is right there, you can see her. But for some reason you don't breathe a sigh of relief.
For some reason, you just feel more tense now, the ringing inside your head growing
louder.
"Luna…" you walk towards her, unsure if you should wake her up or just check on her.
But you do not approach three hoofsteps from her bed before it hits you, like a kick to the chest or a blast of magic right to the face. You almost reel at the suddenness of it, the ringing in your head nearly exploding during half a second, as if somepony had just pulled a sharp hook that was stuck behind your very eyes.
"Luna!" but you recover in an instant, adrenaline taking over as everything dawns on you at once.
How could you not have noticed it before? How could you have let so much time pass you by in some useless breakfast, without even realizing it?!
The ringing in your head, it was the sound of screaming.
The next moment, your hoofs are already on your sister. You fling her covers away, shaking her as you try to wake her up, but another wave of dread washes over you as you finally take a good look at her.
Her expression is horribly twisted, frozen in a soundless scream, her forelegs over her head as if she is trying to shield herself from something. Her body is frozen stiff like a stone, muscles locked in place, her entire posture tense beyond reason.
"Wake up sister!" you shout at her, fear taking over you as you realize that you might as well be trying to rouse a statue from sleep.
Is she even breathing?!
When she finally opens her eyes, the beautiful cyan of her gaze marred, surrounded by a deep red as if she had been crying for her whole life, twisted in fear as if she had just been through something terrible.
And those eyes look at you, directly at you, and you see that they recognize something that summons from within her a sensation that you cannot describe. As if she is looking at anything else, but not at her beloved older sister.
You move to hug her out of instinct, your mouth already opening so that you could say something that might soothe her, even if just a little.
But that movement of yours, that slightest approach, triggers something that is far, far the opposite of what you expected.
"NO!!!"
The world
explodes around you, a bloodcurdling scream from your sister reaches you moments before your own back hits hard against the wall, breaking through it and burying you in a pile of rubble.
You are out from underneath the wreckage in an instant, floating the broken marble bricks away from you with a flick of your magic. But your eyes go wide as you take in the scene around you. Luna's magic has thrown you farther away than you thought. The edifice where your personal quarters were is now a smoldering crater, the violence of the explosion having torn the entire building, and its surroundings, clear from the ground.
You quickly look around you, tension rising within you as your experienced eyes analyze the full extension of the damage.
Half the castle is gone.
"Luna!"
But the one and only thought that comes to you is that you absolutely must reach your sister. You see her, or rather you see the brilliant trail that she left behind, quickly gaining distance from the castle. If anything, maybe that terrible explosion was just an impulse she took to get away from there.
To get away from
you, some dreadful intuition tells you.
But despite the scenery of destruction around you, the whole of your attention focuses on that comet trail that is quickly heading towards the horizon, its complexion growing closer and closer to that of a shooting star as she goes further and further away.
"Luna, come back!" you shout in her direction, you know that she can't hear you, but you shout anyway.
At the same time that you open your wings, focusing your magic on them even as you keep your eyes sharp on that shining star moving towards the horizon.
Even as you hear the panicked screams of your subjects all around you, hundreds of victims from that sudden and unexplainable violence.
You focus more magic on your wings, and they start to glow in gold.
More, and the air around them starts to tremble with heat.
More, until they finally burst with fire, and you aim your whole body on the unerring mark that you had been following with your eyes.
You kick back with your hindlegs, and you don't jump out of the ground so much as you explode away from it.
You leave the castle behind you, although you know that you would have seen a scene of destruction had you but looked back. But it is not that you do not care for your subjects.
The point is that you simply
must reach your beloved sister.
You
have to help Luna.
Over the skies of Equestria, a blazing comet gives chase to a brilliant falling star.
[Your pursuit: 79 +50 (Alicorn) = 129]
[Her flight: 100 +50 (Alicorn) -30 (Scars of Nightmare) -5 (Frustrated) +80 (Traumatized) = 195]
[Oh dear…]
You chase after her through the morning sky, furiously pursuing her on wings of fire. Your are frantic with worry, wondering what the hell might have happened to her. Your mind keeps repeating the same image again and again and again in a cruel loop, as you vividly recall the expression of absolute
horror that she had in her eyes before blowing you away.
But that just makes you beat your wings harder, straining yourself into a level of effort that even your superior body might not be able to keep up with.
You finally approach your sister, your wings screaming as you propel every last ounce of your energy through it, the horn on your head aching in sympathy to your pressurized magic, the skies behind you burning with a trail that will not fade away any time soon.
You notice that her trajectory is starting to descend now, and you finally get close enough to get a better look at her.
She is curled into a ball, hugging herself. Screaming.
She is not even flying, her wings closed shut around her. She propelled herself all the way here with that single explosion of terror-fueled magic.
You race towards her, getting closer and closer, reaching forward with your hoofs, inches away from actually catching her.
But gravity finally has its grips on her now, and although you are mere inches away from her, the trajectory of both of you is now fatally aimed at the ground.
You give one last mighty flap with your wings, combusting the energy on your feathers in an explosion that actually harms you. But that gives you just enough of a push for your hoofs to finally reach her.
You hug your dear sister, bringing her close to your body and putting yourself between her and the fast-approaching ground, bracing for impact and determined to protect her from the neck-breaking fall that is mere meters away.
But your eyes go wide, half a second before your back hits the grassland, as you hear another desperate scream from your sister as she realizes she is in your embrace, and you feel the split-second burst of teleporting magic coming from her horn.
Your body hits the hard ground right after, head first, and the last thing you see is the image of your own empty hoofs, your sister nowhere to be seen.
Everything goes dark.
- - -
You are not sure for how long you have been awake, and you don't really care. Your horn is glowing, as it has been all this time, and your mind is absent-mindedly repeating the magical spell that you have been doing this whole time.
But your eyes, they are focused on your hoofs. You are sitting on your hind, and you are staring at your hoofs in shock.
You can still feel your sister, right there. You can still feel her in your embrace.
She should have been safe in there. She should have
felt safe in there
.
But she didn't.
You keep repeating the same spell, again and again and again, each time hoping that it will achieve a different result.
"Princess Celestia! Thank goodness I found you!"
A familiar voice comes from on high, you have the vague impression that it's somepony you know, and that you have known for a long time. You hear her land by your side.
It's probably Cadence, you think.
You don't really look her way to make sure.
"Celestia, what… what happened?! You are bleeding!" you feel her come closer to you, hesitantly passing her hoof over the side of your head, on the part that had felt warm when you woke up, and then sticky and cold as time went by.
So that was blood. The aching you were feeling from there makes a bit more sense now.
"Celestia, we need you help! We are still digging survivors from under the debris, Shining is back there with whoever wasn't wounded, but we need you! And where is Luna?! We couldn't find her anywhere in the castle!"
Shining…? Oh, Shining Armor, the stallion she has been going out with. You remember vaguely that he is captain on your Royal Guard, probably, and something tells you that he knows somepony else who is close to you…
Oh, but more importantly. Cadence is here! She is a powerful magic caster, she might be able to help you!
"Cadence," you interrupt her, your eyes finally leaving your hoofs and looking at her.
She seems worried. You wonder why.
"Celestia…? Wha-"
"Cadence, could you help me please?" you ask her, looking up at your own horn and hoping she will realize what you are talking about, "Luna was here, just now, but she teleported away. I've been trying to track her, but I just can't detect her trail…"
You look back at your hoofs, seeing that they are moving for some reason.
Oh, you have been rocking yourself back and forward for some time now. Strange that you didn't notice before.
"Celestia…? What do you mean… Princess Luna was here?" she asks cautiously, as if some though is starting to occur to her. As if she is piecing something together.
"Yes, I chased after her from the castle. She was just here, I know I'll catch her teleportation trail if I just try a bit harder…"
Or maybe your hoofs are trembling? Probably both.
"Celestia…" you feel Cadence get closer to you, you can see her pink silhouette right in front of you, "you know that teleportation trails don't last… long, do you?"
"Yes, I know. But she was just here! Now help me with this spell, I know that we will track her if we just-"
"Celestia," she interrupts you, and for some reason you think there is some sort of dawning realization in her voice, her tone suddenly extremely sad. "Do you know for how long you have been here?"
"I-…" the words get stuck in your throat, your entire body is shaking now, "I don't know Cadence, the sun hasn't moved in a long time now, so I lost track of time and…"
You take a deep, sharp breath, some burning sensation coming to your eyes as you look towards the sun. Cadence's question doesn't make sense, but for some reason it still
hurts to hear her ask it. The sun is right there, frozen right on top of the horizon, painting the sky in a deep orange. It hasn't moved in a long time now, like it's waiting there for something, so how the hell are you supposed to know how long you have been here?!
You don't want to know, and you don't care. All you can think about is Luna. Your heart aches when you remember her expression, right when she woke up. You feel sick when you think of what must have happened to cause all of this.
But she will be fine. You know she will be fine. You promised her she will be fine. You promised yourself she will be fine.
You
need her to be fine, or that hole in your heart will never close, it will stay open and aching like it has for the last thousand years.
"My little sister is fine, right?" you suddenly ask, turning towards Cadence while your voice fails, tears falling from your eyes for some reason, "my Luna will be fine, right Cadence? She will be-?"
You feel cadence hug you, whispering in your ear something about how sorry she feels. But you don't listen to what she says.
After all, when she hugs you, you finally forget the sensation you had on your hoofs, the sensation that you had desperately been trying to remember this whole time. You forget how it felt to have your sister in your arms, you forget the last thing you felt before your head hit the ground, and everything turned black.
You finally realize that your sister is not here anymore.
And you hug Cadence back, not being able to hold in the tears anymore.
Curious are the ways of the dice. This was supposed to be an emotional chase, with havoc being cause around Equestria as two demigoddesses raced each other. Luna would start with her "+80 traumatized" and go down "-10" every time she out-raced Celestia. But that would cause havoc in some place as she crash-landed and teleported away in panic at Celestia's approach, fleeing her sister for dear life. Until Celestia's base attribute finally caught up with her.
But then she rolled a natural 100.
Huh…
[Princess Luna is now missing, she is nowhere to be seen in Canterlot after the "unexplained explosion" destroyed half the castle. Every last mare and stallion in service of the crown has been called for to search for her.]
[And it would be best if she is found soon. After all, Despair is the Wolf that devours thought.]
Eight sanity points remain. The Sixteenth blesses.
The rest of the Aftermath shall follow shortly.
