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Luna sighed, setting down her quill and rising from her desk. She'd spent three nights now, trying to hammer this poem into shape, and it just wouldn't come. She knew what she wanted it to say, but she couldn't find the words.

Opening the glass doors to her balcony, Luna stepped out into the warm night air. The stars twinkled overhead, and a pale shimmer of aurora just touched the northern horizon. Summer was almost here now, the Summer Sun celebration only two days away. She'd meant this poem as a private gift for her sister, but she was beginning to doubt she could finish it in time.

Poetry had been so easy, once. Or at least that's how she remembered it. She'd grown up with it, Celestia reading to her from a book of old Eqquish sonnets each night when she was a foal. Luna wondered, not for the first time, how much of her love for the night was tied up in those old memories. Was she always fated to raise the moon, from the time she was born? Or was her cutie mark a product of her own desires? Could she have chosen a different path for herself?

No, there was no use to thoughts like that. The past was the past, and all anypony could do was move forward and try to learn from it.

Only, why was poetry so much harder now than it had been before... before everything went wrong? A millennium ago, she could have dashed through this poem in two hours. Now three nights of work could only produce a bare four stanzas.

A small noise from her chamber brought her attention back from the night sky. She turned, and to her mortification, Luna saw Celestia sitting at her work desk, reading her notes. Her heart thudding in her chest, she hurried back inside.

"Tia! What are you doing up so early?" Frustratingly, her sister ignored Luna's words and kept reading.

"Please, Tia, it is not finished." Still, Celestia made no response. Luna bit her lip, an anxious habit she wished she could quit.

Eventually, Celestia set the page back on the desk and turned. "I've never understood your aversion to letting ponies read your drafts, Luna. It's a good way to refine your work. And it's not early at all. I'm supposed to raise the sun in fifteen minutes."

Luna blinked. Had the night gone so quickly? Truly, this poem had taken too much of her attention, and for what? Her face fell. "I'm sorry, Tia. It was supposed to be a present for you, but I do not think I will finish it by tomorrow. I do not know why writing takes so much longer than it used to."

Celestia chuckled. "It takes longer because you've gotten better, silly."

"No I have not. You remember how many poems I used to write—how much ponies loved them. Now I can hardly write at all."

"Nonsense, Luna. Your old poems were... fine. But you were a princess, of course they were going to be popular. This, though—this is good. Or it might be, once you finish it. Believe me, I've been reading poetry for the last two thous—" Celestia's voice trailed off and she looked back at the poem, a small frown creasing her face. "I'm sorry, sister. I didn't mean to—"

"Please, Tia. It is the past now. Do ponies not say, 'Time heals all wounds'?" Luna forced herself to smile. She'd always wanted to believe that, anyway. And maybe, in another century or two, she'd even know if it were true.