The Real Story

The Real Story is a comic by Nimaru. It depicts the artist's conception of how Nightmare Moon came to be. It is a prequel/companion piece to Gathering Elements.

Style
The comic is presented via four very tall, large-format images with over a dozen panels each. Its visual style primarily uses show-approximate vector graphics. A portion of the first page uses a squigglier hand-drawn style, to differentiate its storybook content from "the real story".

Summary
The comic's story sets in on the evening of Nightmare Moon's defeat, almost directly following the end of Friendship is Magic, part 1. Luna is reading the same storybook that introduced the story of the two royal sisters to Twilight in the first episode. She does not remember exactly what happened 1,000 years earlier, and both the uncertainty and the responsibility upset her.

So Celestia decides to tell her the real story. She starts by paraphrasing the storybook, but veers away from that narrative at the point where Luna supposedly develops resentment over how the ponies are ignoring the night. In this story, her subjects soon learn how wonderful the night can be, and Luna remains content.

One evening, while in the process of raising the moon, Luna is engulfed by a powerful magical force: the Miasma, a manifestation of hate and malice felt by outsiders towards Equestria. Celestia senses what is happening and rushes to her sister, but she is too late. The Miasma has used Luna to take physical form, suppressing its host completely. Celestia exhausts herself trying to separate the two.

Luna's and Celestia's parents arrive as well, the gods of this world who created Equestria in the first place. But instead of attacking the Miasma, they take Celestia and flee. They explain to her what the Miasma is and which steps have to be taken in order to confront it. So she assembles five other ponies, each representing one of the magical Elements of Harmony, with whose help she banishes Nightmare Moon to the planet's satellite.

Her parents help her on the last stretch, and remain behind on the moon. The mother whittles away the Miasma's strength, while the father slips into the darkness unseen, finding what remains of the true Luna and protecting her from harm. They do this for a thousand years, until the day Twilight Sparkle and her friends once again summon the Elements of Harmony.

After Celestia has finished telling the story, Luna reassures her that while she does not remember any of the details, she did feel Celestia reaching out to her every night. Luna goes to bed and before Celestia follows her, she tells some servants who have apparently been listening to feel free to spread the story, to counter any misconceptions ponies might have about Luna's true nature.

Derivative works
YouTube user Anon3mous1 turned the story into a three-part motion comic featuring music and elaborate editing, but no dialogue (part 1).