Discord had been petrified for three hundred years, thoroughly covered in pigeon droppings and growing lichen in uncomfortable crevices, and Celestia was still cursing his name. Or perhaps more accurately, cursing him again.

For the first hundred years P.D., everycreature across the globe had spat his name in anger as they slowly cleaned up lakes of sour, curdled chocolate milk, buried the remains of little irritating gnomes with strawberry gummy guts, and otherwise set their world right as best they could remember. Most creatures saw that the sun and moon had resumed their regular courses, assumed they’d just gone back to normal without intervention and were quietly thankful that they didn’t have to worry about that, at least.

Celestia had to worry about that, and she was sick of it. Sun and Moon had been the responsibilities of a powerful, secretive, and pompous circle of unicorns, before Discord. Discord had wrested control from them by the simple expedient of turning them all against each other, one tap of his claw at a time. The Order of the Circle of the Heavenly Precession had died in a fratricidal melee less a month after Discord had appeared, and all their secrets had died with them.

Lucky for everyone that Celestia and Luna had showed up just then. Lucky for everyone they’d found such useful talents. Lucky for everyone else.

Celestia hated mornings. She’d always preferred to be gently nudged awake by the growing light of day and, three hundred years later, she still hated having to wake herself up in the dark. Well. Mostly she didn’t wake herself up. Mostly the staff drew straws to see who had to go into her chambers and insist she wake up, or sometimes in the winter Luna would carefully lift the bottom of Celestia’s blanket to shove a hornful of snow against the frogs of her hindhooves. That probably didn’t help Celestia’s opinion of mornings.

By her reckoning, she hadn’t had a vacation in three hundred years. It didn’t matter how little she had to do during the day; if she had to start the day being jolted awake in darkness, it didn’t count as a day off. She’d spent about a century sulking about it, but a few decades ago, she’d decided to do something about it instead. Over the last twenty years, she’d been conducting careful experiments in the caves deep under Canterlot: quantifying the flux of sunlight, measuring its magical potential, judging the growth of wheat and barley and apples, carving and recarving glyphs and one mighty artificial leyline that ran from the roots of the mountain and out of its tip.

Last month she’d announced that her court would recess and she would take an official vacation, starting tomorrow. Tonight, she would seal her bedroom with every lock, ward, and sound-deadening spell she knew. Tomorrow, for the first time in three hundred years, Celestia would sleep in.

***

Morning arrived on the 21st of Last Rain in the 304th year Post Discord, and the sky began to brighten. It began to brighten uniformly, horizon to horizon, from black to indigo to orange and pink and finally to a gentle, faint cerulean… but no brighter. Equestria and indeed the entire world were bathed in the gentle twilight of the moment before the sun crested the horizon, and Celestia smiled in her blissful, uninterrupted sleep.

***

Around noon, Celestia awoke. It was not the gentle, gradual incursion of fuzzy awareness that she’d craved. Her world rang as if she had been sleeping in the center of an enormous bell, and that someone had struck it to call all the titans of the world to dinner. She jerked upright, wings shooting out in a panic that sent her blanket flying and herself floating a foot above the bed, which itself vibrated across the room just fast enough for Celestia to crash among the dustbunnies on the flagstones below.

She scrambled to her hooves, head darting around frantically as she attempted to scrape together some sense of what was going on. Discord? Tirek? Some new deviltry--

BOOOONNNGGG

She planted her hooves in a desperate attempt to stay standing as the noise went off all around her again. Her horn lit and her magic reached out, and she swiftly realized what was happening. Her sound dampening spell. It was meant to be a shield so stiff that no sound wave could budge it, and so no sound wave could propagate through it to the interior. But the shield itself was vibrating horribly, as if struck by the hoof of an angry god.

Luna.

Celestia growled. For as grouchy as little miss moonshine got when woken up by a sunbeam, she apparently didn’t have much respect for anypony else’s sleep time. There was nothing for it, though. Luna would be able to get through all the wards as soon as she got bored of shaking Celestia like a parasprite in a jar so, with a flash, the wards came down and Celestia yanked open the door.

”WHAT?”

Luna slowly lowered her cocked back hoof, replaced it in her slipper, and turned to Celestia with as much dignity as she could muster at this hour. She smiled tightly and acknowledged her solar sister with a fractional nod of her head.

“Thy adoring subjects have arrived to entreat thee, sister.”

Celestia huffed, dangerously close to a feral snort. “Court is closed. The announcement has been going out for a month. Surely everypony is aware.”

“We are sure they are, dearest sister. As sure as we are sure that there is a new leyline pouring so much power from Canterlot’s peak into the sky that our position can be fixed upon for a hundred leagues around.”

Celestia frowned, her ire temporarily blunted by the presentation of a technical problem. “The spell matrix should be more efficient than that. Still… the sky shouldn’t be more than a percent or two dimmer than intended. Everything will still grow fine.”

The corners of Luna’s jaw flexed visibly as she clenched her teeth to bite down on her first response. She could think of half a hundred species of plant that would not love the dimness, never mind every wild creature that kept time by the ebb and flow of sunlight. Celestia would brush her off and insist that they’d be fine for a week. She might even be right, damn her, but that wasn’t the point.

She’d shut Luna out of the entire thing. She hadn’t asked, hadn’t confided, hadn’t conspired with her to find a solution. Luna was torn between bursting into tears and striking Celestia the way she’d struck her shield to wake her up. She settled for redirection.

“Be that as it may, the crowd outside is chanting thy name and demanding thy presence. They have brought thee a gift.”

“A gift?”

Luna’s smile turned faintly ugly. “Oh yes. There’s a mare out there who has captured the attention of all in attendance. The Sun requires sacrifice to bring forth the summer, she says. There was something about firstborn colts…”

Celestia’s eyes widened and she immediately shot past Luna. Luna allowed herself a small nod of satisfaction as she turned to find her own bed, but she was only a few lengths down the hallway before she heard her sister’s magically amplified voice.

“Welcome, everypony! I’m so glad you could make it! I’m happy you’ve all come to celebrate the beginning of summer with me! Now that you’re all here—”

The light outside dimmed as the flow of magic to the faintly illuminated sky ceased, then brightened as the actual sun rose above the horizon.

“—we can start the, uh, Summer Sun Celebration in earnest!”

Luna wondered if the castle would survive if she screamed.

***

Celestia hid her face behind her hooves, though her ears were still visible, and visibly flushed with embarrassment. Luna looked faintly smug, and Twilight Sparkle stared at her teacher as if the princess had grown a second horn.

“That was the first Summer Sun Celebration.”

Celestia nodded silently, still unwilling to emerge from behind her hooves. Twilight glanced at Luna as if for confirmation.

“I don’t… oh my Ce—Stars. And you did it again the next year?”

“Everypony expected it…” Celestia explained, just above a whisper.

Luna looked, if anything, even more smug.

“So you see, Twilight, the Smarty Pants Incident is, as I believe you say these days, ‘no big’.”