There was silence atop the small cafe as motes of sunlight dissolved in the wake of the two Celestias leaving. Luna took the opportunity to drain her cup in one long draw before setting it down with a quiet tap of porcelain on porcelain. “Are they gone, do you think?”

Twilight could only shrug noncommittally. “No way to know, but they’ve probably got other things on their minds than spying on us through the sunlight and… sunheat? I’m kind of curious how good that one’s celestial sight is, actually, considering it normally conducts through light.” Twilight glanced up at the virtually invisible thermal source in the sky. “Then again, I suppose nopony said it had to be visible light.”

“Yes, well…” Luna pressed her hooves into her face, took a deep breath and then thrust them out in front of herself. “What the bucking hell?!” she yelled, rattling the tableware. “What in tartarus was she thinking?”

Twilight took a much more sedate sip of coffee and raised an eyebrow at her.

“Okay, okay,” Luna said, rolling her eyes and falling back into her chair. “I understand, Twilight, really, I do. It would have been disturbing and borderline inappropriate to raise an alicorn from foalhood to be Celestia’s partner and paramour, even if she’d passed the job onto us—and I thank the moon that we dodged that arrow—but this alternative is most abnormal, bordering on the bizarre, is it not? Could we not have just… lost the foal in the country for a decade or two?”

“Presumably, if we did that, then the foal would fall into the hooves of Celestia’s bitter and vengeful ex-student, Sunset Shimmer, and be raised to lead a revolt against the rightful rulers of Equestria.”

“Which would be fine!” Luna said with an exasperated whine in her voice. “Gryphons would call that courting!”

Twilight tapped her hoof on her chin, thinking. “Well, she didn’t seem to mind too much when we invaded the royal archives, and I can absolutely see her just abdicating the throne and dropping a crown on somepony, but unfortunately Sunset Shimmer doesn’t exist and the reality would have the potential to be a lot uglier.”

“I suppose,” Luna grumbled, crossing her front legs over her chest.

Twilight busied herself wiping up the last of her fried egg with a stack of daffodil petals. “Does it really bother you that much?” she asked, finishing off her breakfast and following it up with the last of her coffee.

“It’s…” Luna hesitated, holding her breath. “A little soon after there were two of you in a roundabout way, and that did not go all that well,” she admits. “Historically, applying mathematics to alicorns hasn’t had encouraging results.”

Twilight couldn’t help but wince at the reminder and absently ran a hoof along the edge of her shiny new peytral which represented her new status as a properly manifest alicorn. “That was probably one of the reasons she did it, though—to balance the equation.”

Luna made a grumble of acknowledgement. “I suppose we shall just have to see.”

Author's Notes:

• Patreon Funded •

This chapter is a completely legitimate snippet and was absolutely not posted only to point subscribers to the sequel, Sharing the Nation, which is now live, and the first chapter of which has now been posted!

On a completely unrelated note:

Sharing the Nation is now live!
And the first chapter has been posted!

I have six chapters at over 5,000 words each—nearly 35,000 words—ready for posting, so come back for a new one each day until I'm dry and head over to Patreon to check progress on further chapters.