A "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" fanfiction:
Friendship is Magic, Love is Forever
Princess Luna wanders the darkened, long-untouched corridors, looking at the cracked and weathered ivory walls with the soft glow from her horn and remembering fondly what they once looked like, when they were solid and smooth. These halls went forgotten by many after centuries of neglect, but Luna was the exception- being banished to the moon for so long until recently, these ancient foundations were the last thing she recalled. She smiles, remembering her childhood days of bounding down these halls jubilantly, playing with her older sister while they were only fillies...
She stumbles into an old library, whose large, extravagant windows were cracked, dusty and almost completely buried, casting a meager ray of the dim evening light onto the fissured gray marble floor. A large, decaying wooden desk stands weakly near the right wall, covered in dust and littered with cracked, dried-up ink bottles and broken, featherless quills. Across the room was a crumbling fireplace, which was surrounded by a pair of large, splintered bookshelves on either side. Another wave of nostalgia washes over her and she grins, remembering the many hours of studying she often spent here in her older years. She glances over to the old flue, and notices that there were no remnants of ashes- merely a layer of dust lay inside and nothing more. A spark of another memory comes to mind. There was something about that fireplace... She trots over and investigates the wall carefully, looking closely at the left bookshelf, then at the fireplace. When nothing comes to mind, she continues over to the other bookshelf when a look of recognition finally springs onto her face. Her horn glows as she pulls out a book near the top, then three shelves down and a few inches to the right, she pulls another one out. She stops a moment, brow furrowed in thought, before pulling one last book out a shelf above the second. To her joy, a resonating clang comes from the wall behind it, and the back of the large fireplace groans open. With a sense of victory and a grin on her face, Luna crawls inside.
"I don't remember it being this long before... Although, my memory is probably rusty after a good millennium or two." She ponders after a few moments of crawling through the relatively small corridor. Finally, the ceiling opens up, and she comes to a completely unlit, small, closet-like dome. Something is engraved on the far wall, and she squints to try and see. She finally gives up and lights up the dome with her horn to reveal large etching in the marble. She flinches, as the picture engraved is rather unsettling- A great lion's head, whose sinister eyes held strange symbols instead of pupils.
"What... Wait... Those symbols... Those are from an ancient language..." She takes a closer look at the symbols in the lion's pupils, and as she translates them, another old memory is awakened...
A memory that was meant to never be retrieved.
With a gasp, her magical light goes out, and she stumbles back, realizing the grave mistake she had just made. "No... No!"
"Luna! Where are you? We need you in the council room; there's been another Parasprite infestation!" Luna hears her sister call from a distance. She realizes that she cannot let anyone else know about this, or it would only make matters worse. She scrambles back out the corridor and pushes the books back into place, and the passage groans shut just in time for Celestia to peek in around the corner.
"There you are! We've been- Oh, are you alright? You look scared to death, like you've just seen a ghost..."
Luna coughs and shakes away her unseemly disposition.
"A-ahem, you ask if I am scared? Oh no, I am fine. There is nothing to fear but fear itself, after all, right, dear sister? Anyways, sorry to have kept you waiting. Let us hurry upstairs, yes?"
Celestia tilts her head in confusion at Luna's strange behavior, but to her great relief, dismisses it.
"Y-yes, if you say so..."
As her older sister turns and trots back down the hallway, Luna follows, with a stony face hiding the intense worry in her mind.
"Nothing to fear but fear itself... Indeed..."