The Trial
The Equestrian High Court was a grandiose and towering stone structure, in the government quarter of the holy city of Canterlot. Adorned with gilded trim and topped with a symbolic statue of Steady Scales, the first Supreme Magistrate of a unified Equestria, a dignified mare whose once-sharp features had been eroded by centuries of rain, wind and snow. Much like the statue, the role of the High Court had been steadily eroded away over the years by the Princess herself; when it came to high crimes, Celestia preferred to be the judge, jury, and, if necessary, executioner.
As a result, the cobbled public plaza outside the High Court was empty, and the assembled throngs of loyalists, angry dissenters and curious onlookers were instead gathered at the gates to the palace, the great and beautiful edifice at the very peak of the hillside city. There were banners waving, flags and pennants depicting both the judge in this case, and the defendant. This was the trial of the greatest criminal in Equestrian history. This was the trial of Princess Luna.
The thousand years of exile endured by Princess Luna were not actually her punishment, as commonly believed by many ponies. Her banishment had been a simple necessity, the tool by which she was brought to heel, the only way that her reign of terror could be controlled. The Elements of Harmony had expelled her from Equestria and from the planet, banishing her to the moon she so loved and trapping her there for a millennium. For her uprising and efforts to overthrow her sister and establish sole rule of Equestria, however, the crime was treason, and that required an actual trial.
The throne room was the setting, suitably redecorated and with wooden benches installed for the officials and small crowd of selected onlookers, chosen at random in a kind of lottery so that a representative section of Equestrian citizens could observe proceedings, symbolically acting as a kind of silent jury while having no actual input in the case. There was a judge, too, his head adorned with a hefty and ceremonial wig, but he too was merely window dressing. All the power in this ersatz courtroom rested in the crown worn by the Princess, who sat stern-faced atop her magnificent cascading throne. Some claimed that Celestia’s mind had been broken by the pain of betrayal and her physical injuries during the Great Schism, and that she had become a deranged tyrant or a paranoid babbling lunatic over the intervening centuries, but since she was rarely seen by the public at large nopony knew for sure.
It was a sweltering summer day, Celestia’s sun beating down mercilessly on the throngs of ponies waving their banners outside and thickening the air inside the palace. Ponies fanned themselves while awaiting the commencement of the trial, which would begin as soon as the defendant was brought from the dungeon. Guardsponies and members of the Solar Brigade, the Equestrian secret police, kept the crowds back from the ornate iron gates. News of the trial’s outcome would be loudly proclaimed by town criers and newspapers throughout the land, but it would be the ponies gathered at the gates who would be the first outside of the courtroom to hear Celestia’s judgement.
The great heavy wrought-iron doors, beautifully gilded, swung open. The clanking of chains could be heard, and the courtroom fell silent. A squad of guards filed in, followed by two more, who were dragging the reluctant defendant. A collective gasp, a murmur of disquiet, ran around the room at the sight. The face of heresy itself, hidden from public view for a millennium, was now exposed again. Everypony had known what they thought they should expect to see, but Luna’s appearance was even more terrible and shocking than they had imagined.
For centuries she had only been depicted upon propaganda scrolls and newspapers. Even the official portraits which formerly hung in the palace had been removed, either to be burned or left to gather dust in some deep storeroom, nopony seemed quite sure which. It had been hundreds of years since anypony save the dungeon guards and Celestia herself had seen Luna, and where once she had indeed been hauntingly beautiful, time and the rough conditions of her exile had taken their toll upon her physical form.
The prisoner was brought to the stand and forcibly placed in her seat. Celestia’s stern eyes looked down upon her sister, but Luna pointedly refused to meet her gaze. Ponies exchanged nervous glances. Most of them already knew this was merely a show trial; there was only ever going to be one decision made, and a gallows had already been erected in the square outside, no doubt by Sun-Zealots who wished to see the ultimate punishment being dished out to the traitor Moon. Now, with Luna present and Celestia’s imperious and glowering expression, there was no doubt at all that the trial was essentially a complete sham.
“All rise!” called the clerk of the court, and everypony save the Princess and her prisoner did so. “The royal court is now in session, His Excellency Supreme Magistrate Auburn Chase presiding. We welcome Her Divine Highness Princess Celestia, Regent of Equestria and all its territories, Grand Suzerain of Saddle Arabia and Zebrica, Lord of all the creatures of the land, sky and sea.”
The crowd bowed respectfully to their monarch, who gave a simple nod in response. The clerk continued.
“The trial of Luna will now commence. The charge is high treason, murder and attempted regicide. Be seated.”
The ponies sat. Luna had been stripped of her titles and would simply be referred to by name in the trial. There was only one Princess in Equestria now, and she was presiding over the courtroom.
After the opening statements by the clerk and Supreme Magistrate, the trial itself began. In truth it was hard to call it a trial; there was a defendant but no defending attorney. It was more akin to a summary court martial. With an uneasy glance at the former Princess, the prosecutor explained the crime.
“It is known, Your Excellency, fillies and gentlecolts, that the defendant knowingly and willingly attempted to usurp the throne, assaulted Her Divine Highness Princess Celestia with intent to kill, murdered eighty-seven members of the Royal Guard, three hundred members of the Solar Brigade, twenty-two soldiers and officers of the Royal Army, and nine civilians, attempted to foment insurrection and conspired with members of her own Lunar Brigade to do so. These statements are statements of facts, Your Excellency. There is no equivocation here. We have the sworn testimony of Princess Celestia herself, testimony from numerous senior Royal Guard and Solar Brigade officers, and thousands of witnesses. We have confessions from the senior ranks of the Lunar Brigade confirming that the conspiracy took place, and that the defendant was the ringleader.”
As the prosecutor droned on, a singularly unpleasant smell began to waft its way through the courtroom. It was high summer, and the drains and cesspits of Canterlot always began to stink, but this cloying aroma seemed to emanate from closer by, distressing many of the attendees and sickening some with less hardy constitutions. The only pony who did not seem to notice at all was the defendant, whose expression remained as stoic and stone-faced as it had when she was dragged into the court. No return to her home city and its once-familiar smells could rattle her, it seemed. Flies were swirling about the room in intricate dances too, another summer problem common in Equestria, even in Canterlot at its advanced altitude. The audience spent a considerable amount of time swatting or fanning them away.
“Furthermore, Your Excellency, the, ah...the defendant has...so far continually refused to profess her innocence of any of these charges,” the prosecutor continued, pointedly staying away from Luna as he gestured toward her, unlike many prosecutors who would get up close to a defendant to aggressively confront them during heated court sessions, as though he were still afraid of her, despite the chains and magic-denial bracelets affixed to her horn and hooves. “In light of all the facts I have presented, I would say that this is a particularly open and shut case.”
The judge nodded. “Indeed. It seems, in lieu of any evidence to the contrary, that there can only be one conclusion. I, Supreme Magistrate Calico Cedar, find the defendant guilty of all charges. Do you concur, Your Highness?” he asked, turning to Celestia.
“I do,” the Princess spoke for the first time since the trial began.
“Then I defer to you for the sentence, Your Highness,” the Magistrate bowed his head, abdicating responsibility for the final part of the trial to royalty. Celestia looked down at her sister, who still refused to return her gaze.
“I, Princess Celestia, hereby decree,” she boomed out in her Royal Canterlot Voice, enough to be audible to the crowds outside the gates. “You, Luna, are guilty of your heinous crimes. Though you are my own flesh and blood, I may not grant any leniency, for your actions were monstrous in the extreme. There can only be one punishment befitting a traitor like you. You will be taken from this place, disemboweled, and hung by the neck until dead. Your body shall then be burned to ash and the ashes cast into the ocean, that nopony may worship your name or celebrate your treason.””
There was a ripple of nervous whispering around the throne room. The death penalty was only rarely decreed, after all, reserved for the worst atrocities. The Supreme Magistrate turned to the Princess and spoke.
“But, Your Highness...how...”
“Silence!” Celestia snapped. You have my pronouncement. Carry out my orders! Sergeant-At-Arms! Take her to the gallows.”
“Yes...yes, Your Highness!” the leader of the Guard detachment saluted. Warily, he and his ponies approached the prisoner, who seemed to neither hear nor understand her sentence. Even now she refused to meet her sister’s gaze, which evidently irritated the Princess greatly. Even now she refused to cooperate, forcing the guards to drag her from the chair. Even now she remained defiant.
The guards hauled Luna away, past the onlookers in the throne room, their expressions a mixture of aghast, confused and disgusted. In the courtyard outside the palace gates, the expectant crowd cheered, the judgement having been audible thanks to Celestia’s stentorian dictation, which had echoed convincingly about the grounds. The gallows, hastily erected more as a kind of showpiece and angry statement by particularly pious Sun-worshippers- they had brought along a sackcloth-and-straw dummy of Luna to hang if the trial did not go the way they hoped- than in the expectation of it actually being used. With Celestia’s decision made, the eager faithful were hopeful that their ramshackle gallows would suffice, and so it proved to be.
The Guard, aware of the structure’s presence, decided it would save them the effort of building a gallows themselves, and so the palace gates swung open. First, there was an awed hush, as Celestia herself strode out among the onlookers, who bowed their heads deeply as she passed in all her radiance and glory. Such beauty had scarcely been beheld by most of the crowd before, as the Princess rarely appeared in public. She climbed onto the gallows and repeated her judgement to ensure all those present, be they Sun-fanatic, politically atheist, or Moon-cultist, knew of her decree. Cheers rang out from the faithful.
The beauty of the Princess was followed by quite the opposite, as the guards dragged Luna out into the courtyard. The cheers quickly died away and a strange, pregnant hush fell over the crowd. The arch-traitor was amongst them, and suddenly even the most devout were hushed. Once upon the gallows, the noose was fastened about Luna’s neck as the silent crowd watched.
“As befits a traitor,” Celestia boomed, “the prisoner shall now be disembowelled and hung until dead!”
There was silence for a few seconds. The guards paused as though hit by a time-freezing spell. Then a brave stallion in the crowd bravely voiced what everypony else was collectively thinking.
“But...she’s already dead...”
There was a murmur of agreement, but Celestia’s proud face turned into a scowl of anger.
“Guards, carry out the sentence!” she demanded.
“But she’s definitely dead...” somepony else muttered, and there were more nodding heads and confused glances.
“Silence!” she shrieked. “My word is thy law! Obey, or face the same fate!”
Now there was open chatter amongst the crowd. Even the least attentive of ponies could see that Luna’s sentence of death was a case of double indemnity, for she had already been tried and found guilty by nature. The surface of the moon was an airless, barren expanse; when she had been catapulted there by the power of the Elements, she had been able to survive for a while by forming a magic bubble around herself. But soon enough the oxygen which had been displaced from Canterlot along with her and trapped inside her magic converted to carbon dioxide, and she had slowly slipped into stupor, unconsciousness and death. Banishment to the moon, it turned out, was a sentence with no possibility of parole.
Trapped on the airless moon, her body had not succumbed to the elements, for there were no elements to succumb to. The moon, being a magic-imbued entity in its own right, had acted as a kind of stasis chamber for the pony who loved it so deeply. It could not keep her alive, but the subtle magical field was enough to act like a kind of protective atmosphere of sorts and protected her corpse, which had neither decayed as it would on the planet’s surface, nor mummified from centuries of temperature extremes as it would if floating freely in space. Instead, when the banishment ended and transported her back to the spot where she had been standing at the moment Celestia used the Elements, her body was pristine, her mane and tail still shimmering faintly with inherent cosmic radiance, her coat still glossy. In the summer heat of Canterlot, however, that had quickly changed during the preparations for the trial, and now the former royal was not quite in such tip-top condition any longer.
Still the guards hesitated, and Celestia’s anger boiled over. “Very well, I shall carry out the sentence myself!” she snarled, turning to her dead sister. Her horn glowed and a thin shaft of golden light slit the prisoner from shoulder to pelvis more efficiently than any sword. A torrent of putrid visceral filth gushed forth, much to the dismay of those watching. Even Celestia’s Alicorn physiology could not prevent her from momentarily recoiling in distaste at the sickening stench from Luna’s semi-liquefied bowels, lungs and liver.
The crowd stared aghast at the macabre spectacle. One of the guards vomited profusely; several mares simply fainted away in shock. In a normal disembowelling, the victim would be screaming in agony at this point, yet somehow the utter silence from the prisoner was even more distressing. This was not a trial any longer, nor was it an execution. It was a sick puppet-play, the product of a diseased mind, a mind perhaps even more liquefied than Luna’s internal- now external- organs. Celestia’s expression changed to one of confusion as ponies in the crowd started booing.
“Why are you displeased? Are you not entertained?” she demanded to know, which only made the volume of the booing increase. “You are not happy at the death of a traitor?”
“She was already dead, you imbecile!” some anonymous pony shouted, which received an enthusiastic chorus of agreement. Celestia did not even notice the insult, as she was already turning to the hangpony.
“Finish the job!” she ordered. The hooded mare also hesitated, much as the guard had hesitated to use his sword, but she pulled the lever after a few moments. Luna’s corpse slumped and dropped through the trapdoor. The rope pulled taught, and then the weakened, atrophied and rotted muscles of her neck were wrenched apart by the force of the drop. Her head tore loose and tumbled to the dusty cobbles, rolling to a stop in front of the gallows, one decayed, half-blackened eye dangling freely, gently swinging from the bundle of desiccated optic nerves connecting it to the socket from which it had been jerked by the fall.
The booing reached a crescendo and some ponies began to throw the rotten fruit they had reserved for the prisoner at their ruler instead. A few of the guards stepped in, one of them squashing Luna’s loose eye like a soft-boiled egg under his heavy protective boot. With the angry, dismayed crowd rapidly tiring of the farcical spectacle of the execution of a dead mare, Celestia retreated inside the gates of the palace, which clanged firmly shut behind her. Confused, she turned to her advisors.
“I don’t understand,” she muttered. “All I did was have her put to death! Traitors deserve nothing less than death!”
“I think that ship sailed a long time ago, Your Highness,” her Chancellor muttered. “I think it was the...nature of the, ah...execution that displeased the crowd.”
“But...but it could not have been more effective!” Celestia lamented. “Her head even came off...”
The Chancellor sighed, used to long years of dealing with the ever-declining Princesses’ eccentricities and outbursts. “I think her head coming off may have been part of the problem, Your Highness...”