85 years later.

Luna strode through silent halls of plastic and steel, her horn almost scraping against the ceiling. When ponies had begun construction of the lunar colony, they hadn’t had alicorns in mind. The hasty add-ons once the emergency rockets had reached them hadn’t helped matters either, but Luna had long ago learned to accept the casual nuisance in exchange for security.

The sound of clopping hooves echoed from down the hall behind her. As it grew closer, the princess fumbled to get out of the way, her bulky form and large wings hindering her in the narrow hallways of the lunar colony. A mare came jogging around the corner, eyes closed and earbuds in both ears. She hummed to the tune of whatever music was coursing through her ears. The mare trotted along, passed Luna without so much as a notice, and kept going disappearing down a curve in the hallway.

Luna allowed herself a smile and a little skip in her trot. To think, decades before, the colony had been filled with overcrowding, sickness, and despair. Now, ponies took nighttime jogs without a care in the world. Or, well, dimmed light jogs, as the lights spaced every two meters never really turned off.

It took a few more minutes to navigate down the windowless corridors of the colony. Some of them still contained faded paint from murals painted long ago. When they had first arrived, the refugee ponies had found it comforting to paint peaceful scenes from their previous lives in Equestria. Two generations down the line, however, and the ponies now didn’t know anything but slate gray corridors and the occasional starry view out the window and had let them become relics of the Equestria that once was.

Luna shook her head and made her way to a bank of elevators set within one wall. She pressed her hoof on a panel, and a door smoothly slid open from the wall. She squished and shoved herself into the metal box and pressed the top button on the panel inside: the Observatory.

The elevator shuddered and rose through the deep bedrock beneath the surface of the moon, struggling toward the outermost layer and the highest room in the entire colony, not counting the greenhouses which dotted the surface. Luna arched her back, felt it pop, and wished she were laying down in her extra large chambers rather than riding a cramped little box up to see Twilight.

At last, the elevator doors slid open, and Luna stumbled out into the observatory. A dome of hardened glass enchanted with as many spells as Twilight and Luna could come up between them protected a circular room with soft carpets, creamy couches, and nothing else in the way of furniture. Twilight had been quick to fill that void with stacks upon stacks of books; probably around a fifth of all the tomes ponykind possessed at the moment.

Twilight, as usual, had her nose pressed into a book. Her eyes passed over the words like a mother over her favored children. Unlike the other tomes, this one was bound in fragile plastic, with no art nor name on the cover that Luna could see. When Luna cleared her throat from the other side of the room, Twilight’s head shot up, and the book snapped shut in a flurry of magic.

“Princess! I didn’t think you’d come so . . . early.” Twilight pushed the book beneath a stack of more ancient novels with cracked spines and yellow pages. “I was just poring over some of the local literature.”

Luna stepped over a stack of novels balanced precariously on top of one another. She stood across from Twilight, shifting her weight back and forth between her hooves. They ached, but she wasn’t about to complain. Especially not when Twilight stood up on three legs made of steel and infused with spells. The long, white robe she usually wore covered them when she walked, but in front of Luna, she wasn’t as careful.

“It really is good to see ponies writing again,” Twilight said, carefully clearing a stack of worn magazines from one of the plush couches. She sat and smiled at Luna. “The passing down of knowledge and spread of information will go on, even all the way up here. Of course, most of the books are either space adventures or trashy romance, but it’s better than what we had before.” A pause. “Of course, anything is better than what we had before.”

Twilight looked up, and Luna with her. Directly above them—or below, depending on how one looked at it—the earth spun in its eternal dance with the moon. It was greener now than it had been before Emergence Day, as the land ponies had farmed and lived on was steadily reclaimed by vegetation.

“Sometimes I can’t even remember that was our home,” Twilight said. “That we really thought the whole planet belonged to us, that Equestria would be around forever.”

Luna noticed that, without her crown and throne, Princess Twilight reminded her less of the pony who had united the elements of harmony and more of the timid mare whose royal domain had consisted solely of a town library.

“While I was trapped up here for my imprisonment,” Luna said, “I thought the same thing. I had the same doubts, and yet I returned. We’ll take it back, Twilight. All of ponykind is working toward it.”

Twilight’s gaze hardened, and she turned away from the dome. Instead, she pored over maps tacked to the far wall of the observatory. Some were old drawings and simple maps of Ponyville, while others were newer pictographs, showing the spread of the Everfree Forest and current landing sites in detail.

“You’re right,” she said. “We will take it back. The Golems are advancing steadily now. The Mark Is and Mark IIs may have been failures, but from Mark III on, well . . .” she pressed a hoof to a mark on one map, a large metal structure surrounding the ruins of Zecora’s hut.

“In twenty years, my Golems have taken us from complete isolation to having a permanent base in the Everfree Forest. We even own most of the forest now, too!” Her voice climbed a couple octaves. “We’ve survived counterattacks and assaults from the Brutes, and now we can advance into Ponvyille! With Operation Sugar Rush, we can finally—”

“Twilight,” Luna said, pressing a hoof to her shoulder, “you have to breathe. Your lungs can’t handle the hyperventilation, remember?”

A pained look crossed Twilight’s face, but she nodded and took slow, deep breaths. Luna smiled in sympathy, but inwardly was glad for the pause. The Golems may have been Twilight’s favorite toy, but they made Luna’s skin crawl.

Machines that looked like a deadly cross between a pony and a timberwolf, the Golems were the only things able to survive on the ground in Equestria; all while their pilots were safely tucked away on the lunar colony, connected to them by magic. Of course, that survival came at the cost of more weaponry than Luna thought somepony could possibly fit on them, despite the Golems’ massive frames.

“I know that Operation Sugar Rush is important to you, but we still have to be cautious,” Luna continued. “We lost four pilots last month in that ambush near the old Carousel Boutique, and that’s just on the outskirts of Ponyville. Taking your castle is going to see our Golems face many more Brutes, and I fear that we will take many more casualties as well.”

Twilight shook her head. “A month ago, you would have been right, but not anymore. The Mark VI units are in place and will be launching with this mission. They’re faster, stronger, and need even less synchronization to control; our pilots won’t have to worry about the negative feedback.”

She smiled and tried to stand. Her legs squawked and groaned under the load and only managed to dump her back on the couch before Luna caught her with a field of magic. She pushed Twilight to her hooves, who gave her a sour look. “I can handle myself,” she said.

“Anyway, the first wave of twelve Mark VI units are ready to launch with half the Mark Vs, including that one we still have in orbit. The Mark VIs will drop in to encircle the castle, and no Brute can stand in the way of so many of our Golems. We’ll have my castle—and all its books and spells—secured in no time!”

Luna bit her lip. Twilight was staring out the observatory’s dome again, but this time with a smirk. It was a look that said “I’m coming for you, just you wait.” After what she’d been through—and how she was now—Luna couldn’t blame her. Still . . .

“Are you sure this is the best course of action?” Luna prodded. “You’ve seen the numbers; pilot casualties are mounting . . . and this will only make it worse. We can turn back now and—”

“And what?” Twilight asked. “And leave behind everything we’ve worked for? Everything we’ve died for?”

“Twilight, these ponies haven’t even been to the planet before,” Luna said. “They don’t know what it’s like to run in the grass or see the open sky. It’s not something they’ll ever miss, and they’re happy with being comfortable on the moon. Resource projections from the moon itself and the asteroid belt say we can sustain ourselves almost indefinitely here or even expand outward. We don’t have to keep fighting this war.”

Silence settled between them. Twilight, covered in her robes to hide the scars that marred her body and legs that weren’t hers, and Luna clothed in nothing but her fur. The quiet was only broken by Twilight’s hacking cough, which, Luna knew from experience, would come out crimson.

“Maybe you don’t have to keep fighting this war, but I do,” Twilight said. “Living in fear of our home, keeping ourselves penned up in a fancy cage isn’t any way for a pony to live. You said, twenty years ago when this project began, that I could do with it what I wish. Operation Sugar Rush begins tomorrow.”

Luna looked at her with a steady gaze. “Do you really think it’ll work?”

For a moment, Twilight was back to the timid mare in the library, her lower lip quivering and eyes shaking. “It has to,” she said. Then, her back was turned, and she was Princess Twilight once more, staring up at Equestria from among her books.