"Feeling Adrift" (2013) by Jordan S. Bassior MLP Fanfic up on Fantastic Worlds
NOTE: This is an immediate sequel to "A Meeting by Moonlight."
"Feeling Adrift"
© 2013
by
Jordan S. Bassior
After looking at the Moon long and lovingly, then lowering it for the night, Luna retired to the relatively small snack room that both of them preferred to any of the great formal dining halls of the Palace. and long sat there. The servants moved very quietly around her: it was plain to them that she was not in a mood to be disturbed. She was glad when they left.
Luna sat there, eating corn chowder with little crescent-shaped crackers, and sipping hot chocolate. She only peripherally-noticed the taste of her meal - her mind was very far away, in times when her life had been very different.
I’m sitting here in a palace, she thought to herself. I’m the Princess of the Night in a kingdom run by magic and technology which has just gone through its Industrial Revolution and will probably start building its first real computers in a few decades I just put away the Moon for the night, which I do every night, so why does it suddenly feel so strange? And before that I was a madmare living alone on the Moon, for a thousand years. And before that I was the Princess of the Night, in the same kingdom, only it was more like being a medieval queen, like something out of one of those swashbucklers we’d see at the drive-ins. And before that, my sister and I were wandering heroines in a world riven by chaos. And before that, we lived in a mystical house, older than known history, in a post-apocalpytic wasteland. And before that …
Before that had been the life she had relived for a moment, when she had been talking to Twilight Sparkle, when Luna had been Moondreamer and Twilight had been Dusk Skyshine and everything seemed so damned simple because the Universe all made sense and magic and demons were safely relegated to the pages of mythology and weird fiction. Simple, she thought wryly. I was the world’s top astronautical engineer, and the fate of all Ponykind depended on my designs. Most people in that age wouldn’t have considered her life “simple.”
And before that …?
Her mind reeled as it flitted across all her past lives, her other lives, all the people and things she had been, all connected through the matrix of her oversoul. Ponies. Humans. Far less describable beings. Some in appearance would have terrified the little ponies. Some would have terrified them in personality. Some terrified her, from the point of view of her current personality.
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What is the nature of Princess Luna's identity crisis? Find out on Fantastic Worlds.