//------------------------------// // Chapter 9 - Zoe Lulamoon // Story: The New Dawn // by gjhorst //------------------------------// Chapter Nine - Zoe Lulamoon “They really do twinkle.” She put out a hoof and felt the tiny orb. It slowly pulsed as she held it loosely between her hooves. The star gently inquired if she was its Mommy. “No little one, I am not.” The star began to fuss. “Now now,” she comforted it. “I’ll help you look for her. What does she look like?” The star hesitantly began to describe its mother. Its brothers and sisters came up and added details. Soon she was surrounded in a nebula of tiny lights. She was huge one said! And she is round shouted another! She’s bright, sometimes. She’s always looking down they all agreed. Zoe slowly pieced together their shouts. “Be she the moon?” They cheered at her guess. Yes Yes she is the moon. “What mean you? The moon is right...” The moon was indeed gone. In its place there was a tear. Zoe went over and looked through the hole. It was absolutely crammed with nothing, filled to the brim with it. Nothing overflowed. And the nothing stared back, angry. “I’m sorry, I thought you were somepony else.” Turning back to the stars, they looked as though they were about to burst into tears. “Now now little ones? I’ll find her do not worry. When did she leave?” She left with Auntie Bright. Auntie went to go see the little ones below. “Auntie Bright?” Yes Yes! She is just like us... only big like Mommy! Zoe looked back to the Sun, but instead of the Sun there was a seam. Sewed shut by cosmic threads, and sealed with a thick and creamy magic spell. Zoe carefully tasted the galactic spackle. It tasted of age and buzzed on her tongue. Strange. Something was strange. “Something is wrong?” “So she finally sees.” The voice was distant yet everywhere. He voice was jovial in only the way that a stabbing knife could be. A single yellow eye staring at her though the sound, looking deep into her soul, into the nothing. Only then did Zoe realize she had been drowning. Her lungs burned for air but as she gasped nothing came. There was no relief. Her heart raced and sweat boiled off her brow. All at once the nothing stared through her, piercing all that she was. “Oh stop your struggles, its so cliche.” The voice was male. “Now come on! Wake up criminal scum!” The voice became real in a way it had never been. “Wake up?” Already the stars swirled around her in a vortex, screaming. They kicked and clawed and yet the hole swallowed them whole. The black lessening unto it eased into the pure white of everything. “Wake Up!” The guard kicked her and her eyes shot open to the blinding white of cloud. She blinked as her eyes screamed in agony from the assault of light. Everything was light. Everything but her, the guard and the plate. The guard’s kick had shifted her very close to the edge of the metal raft. “It was...” she hacked up phlegm. The wind blew as she tried to spit the thick mucus off the edge of her prison, making her short of her goal. The was blood mixed in with the yellow. That probably wasn’t good. “The Commander wants to talk to you, Pinhead!” It was a dream. The stars were a dream. The dreams were getting worse with the fever. She put a hoof up to her head. The slick sweat and heat agreed; the sickness was not going away. “Do you hear me?” “Yes, I hear you.” Her voice was weak, but the guard seemed to hear it all the same. “Are you going to kill me today?” It had become a kind of sick game she and the guards had begun to play these last few months. She would ask them if they would kill her, and the guard would tell her how they planned to do it. One day it would be by hanging. Another they would would burn her on a pyre. Another they would just let her walk off her platform and say hello to the ground below. It was all great fun. “Not today.” Wait what? “Today you’re talking to Hurricane.” Perhaps it would have been better to die. Hurricane was a legend even amongst the ground bound Unicorns. A brigand who rose above herself and for more than half a century built up a nation from the chaos of her race. They said she feasted on lightning bolts everyday to keep her strong. They said her eyes could see further than a hawk and pierce even the densest fog. Her wings could summon up tornadoes with every flap. She birthed dragons to use as her personal guards. Whatever Hurricane wanted, it could not be good. The guards tossed her a scrap of cloth. “Bind your eyes, prisoner.” Zoe did as they asked, her weakened telekinesis tying the thick cloth around her eyes. She knew why they wanted her blindfolded, it was the same reason they kept her in the bank of cloud, surrounded on all sides with the white puffy oppression. They had seen the Blink Troops and the terror they had brought to the battlefield. One could hardly blame them for wanting to prevent that again. As the guards flew her over on their backs, she pondered her ultimate fate. Why was it that Hurricane wanted to see her? The guards shook her plate for some unknown reason and she clung to it with all her strength, fearful that they had finally decided to just dump her and watch her fly. “Ma’am, we’ve brought Prisoner E,” one of the guards said. “Good. Bring her in.” That was a feminine voice. Perhaps Hurricane? “Leave us,” she said after the the plate had been set down. Roughly a hoof pulled away her blindfold. Before her there was an old greyed mare in bright steel plate. Her mane was a muted prism of color that clashed with her faded yellow coat. She bore a scar on her left cheek and several more down her front legs. She was thin and hard as a wire. “Zoe Lulamoon, good morning.” Hurricane smiled, “Tell me what you know about the sun.” Zoe blinked, “The sun?” What was there to say? “Yes. The sun.” The mare turned her back to the prisoner and walked over to a cloud table full of steel. She carefully lifted a bright wingblade and began strapping in on her left wing. “Tell me what you unicorns have been doing with the sun.” Had they begun trying to use the sun as a weapon in the war? She had not noticed how the the pattern of light and dark had fallen in her cell. Were the fools in canterlot really that desperate? “The sun is controlled from the solar tower in...” Hurricane cut in, “Don’t lie to me, Lulamoon! We already know of the Sun Mare! How did you make her?” Hurricane moved up close to the mare, glinting steel under pale plumage. “I don’t...” “You were a high caster of the court, Lulamoon. It was you they entrusted with deciphering the thunderforge. Surely such an important undertaking must have been known to you.” She was visibly angry, wings flared and ready to strike. Zoe tried to choose her words carefully, “Um... The sun is guided by...” Cold steel on the edge of her throat, “Choose your next words wisely, Zoe. They may be your last. I have little time to listen to dogmatic lies. What do you know of the being who controls the sun?” “She... Um, She...” Zoe panicked not knowing what to say. “She knew she was coming to Earth. She left her throne sealed.” Why had she said that? This seemed to satisfy Hurricane. She pulled away the razor thin blade. “Go on.” A dream, that was all that is was, brought on by fever. However, it seemed to satisfy the mare. Perhaps the Earthen gods were true and one had paid her a kindness. In any case, it was all she had left to say. “Um... She still left with haste, telling no one save her sister.” Hurricane’s ears pricked up. “Sister?” “The moon.” The words came easy, like water from a glass. “She has fallen too, but she has left Nothing in her wake, and that Nothing is angry.” Hurricane seemed confused at that, but she let it slide. “Where is she then?” Hurricane looked back to the open window. “Where? I...” This had not been part of the dream. “She is here, on Earth?” It was a guess, she knew. “But where?” Hurricane’s words were almost as sharp as the steel. Zoe’s words fumbled, “I... I... I don’t know?” Zoe had thought this would make the mare angry. But instead she merely walked over to the entranceway. “Guards!” she called. “Make preparations to take Prisoner E to Operation Skyfall.” The guard saluted silently. Turning back to Zoe, “You have made yourself useful today, Lulamoon. As such I am going to tell you something very important.” She sat down, “One; the war is over. We are all united now together as Equestria. Two; they do not know you are still alive. So if you intend to ever feel earth under those hooves again, you are going to help me.” “Help you? With what?” She did not like the way this was going. “You might have caught us off guard with your first one, Miss Lulamoon, but we have intercepted the second.” She grinned, “As we speak we are surrounding her with every wing in Equestria. You, Lulamoon. You are going to harness her, for us.”