Fanfic / Sharing the Night

Sharing the Night is a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfiction by Cast-Iron Caryatid.

One day, Twilight Sparkle finds herself experiencing an unexpected growth spurt. The next night, she finds herself with a pair of wings on her back as every star vanishes from the night sky. What follows is a long personal journey as she grapples with the reality of being a nascent alicorn, facing against irate astronomers, hungry star beasts and a faceless hunger from beneath the world as her attempts to learn more about herself uncover ancient secrets that were buried and forgotten long before Luna and Celestia ever walked the world.

The story was published in March 2012 and was completed in August 2019. A sequel, Sharing the Nation, was begun on the same month and discusses Twilight dealing with the fallout of the previous story's resolution alongside a sudden migration of dragons into Equestria. It is incomplete.

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This work contains examples of:

• Alien Sky: Since the celestial bodies are made of and moved about by magic, the appearance of the sky is ultimately determined by the nature, needs and artistic inclination of the alicorns controlling them. As a result, the sky undergoes a number of dramatic revolutions over time:
  • As a general condition, the sky itself is essentially a field of magic that extends over the world and does not obey the same physical rules as the fully material planet below. Most prominently, rather than orbiting the planet, celestial bodies are part of one of two "blankets", the night and the day, that are moved wholesale between the visible world and a pocket dimension known as the Umbra during dusk and dawn. One result of this is that the sky always looks the same regardless of the angle of viewing; for instance, at sunset, the sun will always appear to be setting, in the same place and at the same angle, regardless of where the viewer is.
  • Luna liked carefully arranged, permanent patterns. This resulted in Equestria's canonical night sky of stable, evenly spaced stars and constellations similar to the real world's.
  • When Twilight bonds with the stars, they vanish entirely for the first night, leaving a black void until she figures out how to bring them back. When she does, they appear in a random pattern of dense clumps and strings separated by empty spaces. Afterwards, her habit of bringing them out all at once in a single sky-wide burst causes them to destabilize entirely, leaving them to flow across the sky in great eddies and currents until she eventually puts them away again at dawn.
  • In the ancient past, there were neither sun nor stars at all, while the moons were two. The sky was instead lit by a diffuse glow by day and was a perfect black void at night the held only the bright white dreaming moon and the black nightmare moon, the latter usually invisible against its backdrop. The sun was born when the alicorns of light and of fire chose to fuse into a single being. Later on, the twin moons were destroyed when the alicorn of the nightmare moon used her orb to destroy the dreaming moon when it threatened to fall into and destroy the world; the stars are simply the burning wreckage that remained in the sky, while the current moon was born from a failed last-ditch attempt to restore the old ones.
  • In the climax, Astri creates a rough, cracked and smaller moon by patching together chunks of moon rock dug out of the earth, which is soon after broken apart to become a fixed arc of stars and nebulae. In the epilogue, Celestia fuses with the seed of Harmony and then splits back into two identical selves in order to evenly redistribute the magic of the ancient alicorns of light and fire, which causes the sun to split between a barely-visible "shimmering thermal bloom", which provides the world with heat, and a horizon-spanning rainbow arc, which provides it with light. They rise and set in opposite directions, and create a dazzling nova-like effect when they cross at noon. As a result, shadows become slightly smeared laterally and rimmed in rainbow effects, and no longer protect from the brunt of the daytime heat due to being cast by different bodies.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: Or Equimorphic Personification, as the case may be. Alicorns aren't simply powerful ponies who use magic to control some part of nature; on a fundamental level, they are thing that they preside over. Thus, on becoming an alicorn, Twilight also becomes the stars themselves, so that her physical self and the mass of magic and light in the night sky are extensions of her single being.
• Artificial Hybrid: In the climax of Sharing the Night, as a result of having accidentally absorbed Discord's dragonfire when merging with the Seed of Harmony and splitting into two versions of herself, the two new Celestias end up being part dragon. They have a number of outwardly draconic traits such as sharp teeth and forked tongues, and their magic becomes supernaturally attractive to full dragons.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Both Luna and Twilight find Luna's new chair in Sharing the Nation to be highly distracting, and spend inordinate amounts of time spinning around on it.
  Spike stared at the two-thousand-year-old goddess playing around with her office chair. He was attempting to formulate a response when his thoughts were interrupted by the revelation that it could spin, too.
  "Whee!"
  He wanted one.

  Twilight spent a good half an hour making up the new invitations for Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie. This was in spite of them looking more like she'd spent five minutes on them and the other twenty-five spinning around in Luna's chair.
• Caged Inside a Monster: Dragons are immortal beings who never stop growing, eventually becoming titanic things of living earth and rock, entering nearly eternal hibernations and becoming part of the landscape; almost every part of Equestria is made up of unimaginably ancient dragons sleeping on top of and around each other. Tartarus, specifically, used to be a dragon by that name who decided to contain all evil beings in the world by swallowing them and imprisoning them within himself. By the time he entered his permanent, rocky hibernation, he had become a living, cavernous prison still holding an uncountable number of ancient horrors imprisoned in his gut, which had been transformed and partially "digested" to become a host of lesser monsters that still wriggle to freedom past his jaws every now and again.
• Canon Character All Along: Chapter 12 introduces a number of OCs to populate the ancient past. One of them is Couscous, an ambassador sent from the dragon empires to the alicorn city of Utopia. Later on, it's revealed that he is in fact Discord, or at least the person that Discord was born as. What do you get when you take a magic-less pony, have his fire of life torn out by an angry alicorn, fill him with dragonflame to replace it, have him survive the apocalyptic rain of stars that destroyed civilization and gave magic to mortal life and then leave him to ponder the ruins of the world and the deaths of everyone he knew? As it so happens, you get a pony-dragon hybrid with extremely powerful and unique magic, who then sets out to create his own perfect dream world to replace the sad ruins of reality with.
• Celestial Body: After bonding with the stars, Twilight's mane and tail become flowing fields of night-black magic sparkling with stars, similar to Luna's. Luna's mane, in turn, ceases to be this and instead becomes a silvery-white field similar to the surface of the moon.
• Chekhov's Boomerang: Twilight's cutie mark (which was, at least from Twilight's perspective, a Chekhov's Gun in canon, as noted in Season 1 Episode 23). It represents her talent in magic, depicted abstractly through "the spark of magic" in a starburst shape. As it turns out, it also represents the stars in a much more literal sense.
  "But I've had my cutie mark for years!" Twilight countered, looking for some flaw that would make giving Luna’s stars back the right thing to do—as if that would also somehow make it possible.
  Celestia simply cocked her head to the side, looking at Twilight's flank. "It looks accurate to me."
  Twilight twisted around—and around and around and around—looking at her cutie mark, scared that it might have changed; it had not. Adorning Twilight's flank was a pink six-pointed star surrounded by smaller white stars. "What—? No! The stars represent the spark of magic!"
  "They do," Celestia confirmed. "Is it so hard to believe they might also represent stars?"
• Circling Birdies: In Sharing the Nation, Twilight flies hard into Fluttershy's cottage and comes close to knocking herself out. The narration notes that, although she is now much more used to literally seeing stars since her ascension, seeing birds is a bit new for her — although in this case the circling birds happen to be Fluttershy's mind in the bodies of three songbirds, who's hovering worriedly around Twilight's head.
• Colony Drop:
  • When Luna fell, became Nightmare Moon and was banished from the world, the night sky became destabilized and several stars fell to earth, eventually gathering together to become the star beasts.
  • Much, much earlier than that, a far more disastrous version of this occurred when the two moons that existed at that time crashed into and destroyed each other, scouring the world with a hail of burning rocks that lasted for years, wiping out the ancient world's civilizations; the bits of wreckage that remained in the sky became the first stars.
• Clockwork Creature: When Celestia starts to feed magic to Harmony to guide along the latter's awakening, this forms by itself into an intricate body of golden clockwork for the newly conscious alicorn to inhabit.
• Connected All Along: In the first story, Luna and Twilight rouse and speak to an ancient dragon known as Emberstoke, who serves as their original window into the ancient past. In the sequel, it is revealed that he is the father and grandfather, respectively, of the canonical dragon characters Torch and Ember; the latter was named after him.
• Crying Wolf: Twilight used to pretend to be an alicorn to avoid her mother's demand for grandfoals, but did that so often that her mother no longer believes her once this claim is actually truthful.
  "Wh-bring a mare...?" Twilight sputtered. "Mom, I told you in my letter, I am seriously an alicorn princess this time!"
  Twilight Velvet let out a dejected sigh. "Well, you girls might as well come in," she said, disappearing back inside.
  Twilight and Luna remained standing on the doorstep for a moment. "'This time?'" Luna asked.
  Twilight, who had her face buried in her hooves, let out a groan. "Ever heard of 'the filly who cried timberwolf?'" she asked sourly, following her mother into the house.
• Cutaway Gag: In Chapter 2 of Sharing the Nation, Applejack asks Twilight what she plans on doing with all the rubble of the destroyed crystal palace, and Twilight replies that, as it so happens, Ponyville has had a sudden influx of lithivorous residents who find it incredibly amusing to eat pieces of a pony palace. The very next scene cuts to Spike returning home with groceries that include a bag of the aforementioned crystal rubble, which Ember immediately snatches and starts gorging on.
• Damned by Faint Praise: In Chapter 5, after some flight training, Twilight's flying is described as having "the Rainbow Dash seal of yeah-you-can-probably-make-it-home".
• De-power: Discord's power is eventually derived from the stars, since stars are the origin of all mortal beings' magic, and Discord so happens to have been the very first pony to absorb and be profoundly changed by magic when the first stars fell to earth. When Twilight becomes an alicorn and claims the stars for herself, she inadvertently pulls this power from Discord and leaves him bereft of his original cosmic power, although he is still immortal and capable of some restricted magic. He takes this all rather in stride.
• Dream Land: The Desert of Dreams is a "second night", a mass of stars buried underground, where dreaming minds go, filled with the forms of sapient creatures that continuously form out of stardust and crumble back into formlessness as their physical selves fall asleep and wake. Originally, twin goddesses had dreamed dreams and nightmares for all sapient creatures in the world; in the present day, people are able to dream independently because their minds are naturally drawn into the otherworld formed from the ruins of the two deities' celestial bodies.
• Elemental Embodiment: After becoming a demigoddess, Rainbow becomes literally made out of rainbows and lightning — her true form is a mass of blue electricity and colorful light, which she can mask with a body mostly like her original one.
• Family Theme Naming: In Sharing the Nation, it turns out that Ember was named after her grandfather, Emberstoke the Eternal.
• Fantastic Measurement System: In addition to the standard hooves instead of feet, Twilight measures things in bookshelves and bookshelf-heights:
  “Well jeez, what rumbled your raincloud?" Dash retorted, perturbed with the sudden attitude.
  "A giant bear a hundred bookshelves tall!" Twilight yelled in frustration.
  "Are bookshelves a unit of measurement?" Rainbow Dash snarked. "Wait—are you serious?"

  Twilight caught herself on a ladder, slowing her decent as it extended downwards, speeding along its tracks for only a short moment before jerking to a stop and flinging Twilight the last few bookshelf-heights to Astri’s doorstep.
• Floating Continent: Utopia, the ancient city of the first alicorns, was a mountain of shaped clouds, so large that an observer on its peak would not see its edge on any side, and covered in palaces and towers.
• Furry Reminder: In the first chapter of Sharing the Nation, while leaving one of Pinkie's parties, Luna comments favorably on the toasted anise offered among the snacks. Twilight replies that that wasn't a snack, Luna just ate the potpourri.
• Fusion Dance: The ancient alicorns Luma and Vita merged into a single being, Solaria, the first solar alicorn, as an expression of their love for each other. This turned out to be a terrible idea; by merging into a single person, they also doomed themselves to a life of loneliness, as their merged self would perceive herself as one being with two sets of memories, carrying an undying love for people that she would never see or interact with again.
• Future Imperfect:
  • In Chapter 9, Luna tells Twilight of an old story she knew in her childhood, which was old even then, about a pair of twin goddesses who shepherded dreams and presided over the moon, whose dark side was known as the nightmare moon and viewed as an ill omen, and eventually killed each other. She does not view this as anything other than a fairytale, but used it as inspiration for her villainous persona. It is eventually revealed that in the ancient past, long before Luna and Celestia's time, there were two moons, the white dreaming moon and the black nightmare moon, each with its associated alicorn; the alicorn of the nightmare moon was forced to smash the two orbs together and destroy them both when the dreaming moon threatened to fall to earth, at the cost of her and her sister's lives. Eventually, long after the fall and slow reconstruction of civilization, these events came to be remembered as nothing more than a vague fairytale bereft of names or historic meaning.
  • In Chapter 10, the ancient dragon Emberstoke describes the end of the old world as an apocalyptic, years-long rain of fire and rock as the previous incarnation of the alicorn of the stars died, sending her charges falling from the heavens and causing the world to die with her. It is later revealed that there were neither stars or an alicorn thereof in those days; the rain of fire he describes was actually the result of the two moons that existed back them colliding and falling as rains of meteors, while the stars were formed from the debris that remained in the sky. As Emberstoke was only a hatchling back then — he specifically describes this as his earliest memory — his account was marred by an incomplete recollection that he had subconsciously filled in using his knowledge of what became the new order of things.
• Future Primitive: The dragons are noted to be something rather like this. While the details of life in the ancient dragon empires are somewhat vague, they are known to have had formal rulers, a complex multi-species society, an interest in aesthetics, and the ability to craft powerful magical artifacts. This civilization died alongside the ancient world, and the modern Smaug-like loners who live in caves and hoard piles of gems are essentially barbaric savages with no trace of their ancestors' culture.
• Hive Mind: Post-ascension, Fluttershy is telepathically connected to all animals within a fairly broad range of herself, allowing her to experience everything that they do and to take over direct control of them at need, which is marked by them gaining her normal coloration for the duration of this possession.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • In the flashback episode, the white moon begins to fall out of the sky when its alicorn Somni, having fallen into catatonic despair, loses the will or strength to hold it up. To prevent it from destroying the world, the other lunar alicorn, Fati, smashes her own moon into it, destroying both and ending her and Somni's lives in exchange for allowing the world to live.
  • In Chapter 20, Astri tries to destroy the moon in order to kill Luna, but is prevented from doing so when Harmony charges into her attack, deflecting it at the cost of her own life.
  • In the epilogue, Discord secretly gives up his essence to resurrect the dead alicorn Harmony, which interacts with Celestia's plan to do the same by absorbing Harmony's weakened essence and then splitting in two to create a pair of smaller, identical Celestias with Discord's draconic features.
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: In the first story, when commenting on how she's lied about being an alicorn so ofte that her parents no longer believe her about it, Twilight describes herself as "the filly who cried timberwolf".
• I Was Having Such a Nice Dream: Luna and Twilight rouse the ancient dragon Emberstoke from his slumber for a conversation when they need to learn about the ancient past. At the end, before going back to sleep, he sarcastically comments that he's going to try to return to a rather nice dream that he'd been having.
  "If that's all, I was having a nice dream, I think, and I should like to chase it down."
• Interspecies Romance: Fluttershy mentions offhandedly that two of her animal friends, a ferret and a squirrel, are in a steady relationship.
• Lazy Dragon: As dragons mature, they begin to spend increasingly long periods of their time asleep, and awake for shorter and shorter spans. Young adults, such as the one in "Dragonshy", hibernate for a century or so at a time. Truly ancient individuals never wake at all, but instead gradually merge with the landscape itself as soil and plants accumulate on their bodies.
• Living Lava: As they age, dragons become vast beings of living rock. Some specifically become rock of the more liquid persuasion.
  • The ancient dragon Emberstoke the Eternal resembles a titanic mass of jagged rock and flowing lava, with only rough approximations of limbs and a face. In his sleep, his body forms an active volcano.
  • Another dragon found beneath the Everfree is composed entirely of regular rock, but ends up being melted down in its entirety by Celestia channeling the fires of the Sun into it. This does not slow it down at all, and it simply continues fighting her while composed entirely of molten lava.
• Metal Muncher: Spike mentions in the later chapters that he's been cooking a lot with metals like rubidium in lieu of his usual gems because "you can't have dessert all the time". The sequel establishes that metals make up the bulk of the draconic diet — Spike's narration mentions him buying hammerscale as groceries of sort at one point — which makes cohabitation with other species tricky since dragon cooking coats the implements used for it with dangerous levels of heavy metals.
• Monster Progenitor: Tartarus, in a somewhat roundabout way. In ancient times, he was an immensely old and powerful dragon who sought to contain the evils of the world by eating them. These horrors, devoured and digested, were transformed into a host of lesser entities that periodically crawl to freedom from his body. Manticores and chimerae are among the monster species produced by Tartarus in this manner, and Cerberus is also believed to be his progeny.
• Mundane Utility: An alicorn's true body is the celestial object or phenomenon that they emody; the equine body walking around on the surface world is a magical construct that can be discorporated and remade at will. Twilight uses this keep herself groomed and refreshed by quickly dissolving her body when she's dirty or tired and remaking it a more presentable shape. In one scene she dismisses visual afterimages from bright light by repeatedly discorporating and recorporating her eyes.
• Mythology Gag: The story was first written and plotted out during at the tail end of Season 2, was only completed during the later half of the ninth and last season, and its mythology-heavy setting and worldbuilding had limited ability to expand to incorporate events, concepts and characters introduced as the show's own setting developed in its own direction. However, a number of these things are referenced in humor over the story's course.
  • When Twilight is visiting her parents, Velvet makes an oblique reference to having another kid. Twilight is vehemently opposed to this idea, both because she does not want a sibling twenty years younger than her and because she does not want to explain to her friends why she suddenly has a brother out of nowhere. This is based on the opinion, common in the fandom at the time of this writing, that Twilight turning out to have a famous, beloved and heretofore-unmentioned older brother in the Season 2 finale was rather weird.
  • In the epilogue, Twilight sarcastically describes a scenario where Celestia's bitter and exiled ex-student Sunset Shimmer leads an armed revolt against the throne, "but unfortunately Sunset Shimmer doesn't exist".
  • In the sequel, Twilight states that she is the alicorn of the stars, not of some nebulous concept like friendship.
  • While discussing possible replacement homes after their palace's destruction, Twilight mentions disliking on of Rarity's potential designs, a giant crystal tree with a castle in its boughs. The tree itself was fine, but she found adding a full castle on top of it to be gaudy.
• Noodle Incident:
  • In her youth, Twilight tried to convince her parents that she was a princess on a number of occasions. The details are not delved into beyond noting that she did this often enough that they do not believe her now that she is an actual princess and a full-sized alicorn.
  • Twilight is banned by Celestia from attempting sexual innuendos in the castle due to an unspecified incident.
• Our Dragons Are Different: The Smaug-like dragons seen in the show are technically only young adults. As they mature, they gradually become creatures of earth and rock, grow increasingly large, lose their ability to fly, and begin to hibernate for longer and longer periods of time. Eventually, they become landform-sized and -shaped beings that spend the rest of their lives slumbering and dreaming. The majority of the world consists of incredibly ancient dragons sleeping atop and around one another. They are also lithovores, with a diet consisting chiefly of crystalline minerals and heavy metals. In the distant past, they ruled over vast empires of mortal beings, but the cataclysmic death of the old world and Discord's reign destroyed these and resulted in the deaths of most mature dragons, creating a generation gap between the oldest ones born since then, which have just about become the classic giant firebreathers by the story's time, and the truly ancient, fully quiescent elders.
• Perfectly Cromulent Word: Twilight's realm consisting solely of libraries is a "librararchy". In Sharing the Nation, Twilight refers to Celestia absorbing draconic magic and then splitting into two part-dragon alicorns as "bilizardification".
  That's just one of the more likely hypotheses for dragons appearing so soon after Celestia's... bilizardification.

  Well well well... wasn't that an interesting conversation? The goddess of the sun had been... bilizardified? The figure decided that this was clearly the process by which a pony was improved by becoming two lizards and didn't give it a second thought.
• Rhetorical Question Blunder: When discussing the palace that is being built in the center of Ponyville, a huge thing of black crystal, glass and moonstone, Twilight, who is more than a little uncomfortable with the situation, jokingly suggests that it looks like something Luna might have designed when she was Nightmare Moon. Luna replies that yes, this is in fact precisely the case.
• Rock Monster: As they age, the flesh and bone of dragons gradually transforms into rock, sometimes adorned with metal or lava. The truly eldest dragons resemble nothing so much as huge masses of rough stone, with great plates and splintered crags suggestive of tails and limbs and faces.
• Shout-Out: In Chapter 23 of Sharing the Nation, when critiquing the sort of bare-bones caves that dragons live in, Twilight comments that Torch's lair isn't even the nice sort of hole in the ground, but just "a dry, bare, sandy hole without even a place to sit down and eat".
• Something We Forgot: In mid-chapter 19, Luna casually mentions that they stranded Discord on Rainbow's cloud house because they forgot that he no longer has his magic.
  "Discord... is currently lurking around Rainbow Dash’s cloud house on account of being left there by a full half dozen ponies who do not realize that he is incapable of getting down from it on his own—and me, who just doesn't like him."
• Stars Are Souls: An unusual variant. When the stars were first formed, many fell to earth and remained embedded within mortal ponies, granting them a tiny sliver of innate magic. Ever since, every pony has been born with a star inside of them, which is the source of their natural magic and vitality. These move on to other ponies after death, and Twilight speculates that reports of people who can recall past lives might be due to some ponies being able to access the memories of those who carried their particular star in earlier times.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: In Sharing the Nation, Twilight and Ember independently come up with "bilizardification" as a way to refer to Celestia splitting into two partly-draconic alicorns.
• That's No Moon: Dragons are immortal and never stop growing, eventually become titanic things of earth and rock, enter permanent hibernations and become part of the landscape; most of the world is made up of unimaginably ancient dragons sleeping on top of and around each other, something most people don't realize unless something wakes the dragon up. The ones described in the story include Whiskers Whitetail, better known to the ponies as the Whitetail Woods; Emberstoke the Eternal, who in his sleep forms a large volcanic caldera; and Tartarus, who when awake decided that the best way to contain powerful, evil creatures was to devour them and imprison them in his cavernous gut.
• The Thing That Would Not Leave: Early in Sharing the Nation, Ember comes to Ponyville as part of the general dragon immigration and invites herself into the former library, which is now serving as Spike's home after Twilight ascended and moved out. She promptly makes herself a permanent fixture of the place, and to Spike's immense irritation it turns out that growing in dragon culture makes one into a pretty lousy houseguest.
• The Worm That Walks: Fluttershy post-ascension straddles the line between this, magical possession, and a form of Animorphism. Most of the time, she retains her regular pre-ascension body, but she also mentally inhabits all animals within a considerable range of herself and can burst apart into a swarm of smaller critters when injured or pressed, which can afterwards reassemble into her usual body.
• Time Abyss: Luna and Celestia are about two thousand and change years old. Far older than them are the eldest dragons still capable of being roused, whose memories stretch back many millennia. The eldest spoken to, Emberstoke, recalls as his very earliest memory the scouring rain of fire and stone that ended the previous world. Gemini, the ghost of two of the ancient alicorns, has the cumulative memories of the two deities whose deaths caused this catastrophe, who had already been ten thousand years old in the bygone age.
• Weird Moon:
  • The phases of the moon, instead of being caused by the shadow of the world across it, are due to it having a white hemisphere and a black one.
  • The ancient world had two moons, one pure white and one pure black, the latter almost impossible to see in the then-starless night; the modern-day moon was created by merging their remains together.
  • In the climax of Sharing the Night, Astri creates a new moon by ripping large chunks of long-fallen moon rock out of the earth and sticking them together to create a crude facsimile moon, smaller than Luna's and with visible cracks and holes.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: Discussed and deconstructed. Shortly after becoming an alicorn, Twilight, who has been thinking about how alicorns and immortality are often portrayed in in-universe fiction, hesitatingly asks Celestia about what immortality will be like. Celestia replies by stating that the myth that immortality is an endless torment of grief and disconnection is just that, a myth. Yes, she will lose friends and grieve, but in time people make their peace with grief and move on, and being immortal means that she will always have new friends and new experiences to look forward to.

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