//------------------------------// // Interlude - Night Flight // Story: Pony Gear Solid // by Posh //------------------------------// Luna seethed all the way from Canterlot to the Everfree Forest. Celestia felt slighted by Luna sneaking around behind her back? Fine. She demanded contrition? Fine. But sticking her in a room full of pompous aristocrats – and Fancy Pants, to be fair – did nothing but waste her time. It was a despicable power play, no doubt concocted out of the same misguided desire to keep Luna safe that informed so much of Celestia's caution, and so many of her decisions. Those changelings left their mark on you, sister. In more ways than one. As Celestia predicted, the Grand Galloping Gala planning committee meeting ran well into the wee hours, with no sign of stopping. The committee members squabbled over every trivial matter, from decor to music to dress code, unable to reach consensus on anything. Finally, in desperation, Luna seized Fancy Pants's flask from his coat pocket, downed its contents in a single gulp, and proclaimed herself too drunk to continue with the meeting. She wasn't, of course, but they didn't need to know that. The alicorn constitution is truly a thing of wonder. It was sure to cause quite a scandal, come daybreak. Prince Blueblood couldn't stop snickering, and that odious Spoiled Rich had a look on her face that suggested she was contemplating which tabloid she would speak to first. Luna didn't care. Her dignity and her image meant nothing, compared to the responsibility of safeguarding the realm. Though I really ought to compensate Fancy Pants for the brandy. As she flew, she spotted a curious weather system in Ponyville, off in the distance – a thick mass of fog, like a cloud come down from the heavens, enveloping the entire town. The sight of it niggled at Luna. Ponyville was often the site of peculiar happenings, and neither she nor Celestia would fain investigate every single one. But with this human situation afoot, and so close to Ponyville, too... Concern for Twilight Sparkle nearly made her bank west to investigate, but she marshaled herself before the impulse could overtake her. She'd peek in on Ponyville when her business in the Everfree was concluded. Celestia didn't want to involve Twilight, not yet, and Luna promised to uphold that directive... but there was no harm in just checking, surely. The castle came into view gradually, a rubble-strewn ruin on a river island deep in the Everfree Forest, situated between two sheer cliffs which plunged down into deep ravines. Luna studied what remained of her erstwhile home, a thousand memories flashing in her mind. Court with Celestia, banquets with aristocrats, gossip with her ladies-in-waiting... the fateful night she succumbed to the nightmare, and the morning that saw her redemption... other memories, more pleasant ones, and other ponies, too... A warm body curving against her back. Lips and nose kissing and nuzzling behind her ear, making her giggle and sigh... Luna shook her head and turned away from that recollection, shutting the others behind their doors as well. The ponies she'd made those memories with were dead and gone, a thousand years or more. No good would come of unearthing them. Bury the past, and leave it buried. From the air, Luna could see the full scope of the castle's desolation. The western gatehouse had collapsed, and the curtain wall it had been part of was nothing more than scattered stones along a vaguely ovular path. To the east, the curtain still stood, but the yard and keep it encircled had fallen away, swallowed by the earth. All that remained of the castle proper was a portion of the west garden, where the bladed machine sat, and part of the inner curtain that had once guarded the western side of the keep. And, of course, the towering, ebony ring encircling the pit which housed the Threshold of the Moon. Of all the things to survive... But that is no surprise. Its foundation is firmer, and runs deeper, than the rest of this old place. Such things do not break easily. Luna alighted upon the partially intact keep wall and folded her wings, ruffling them to stave off the night's chill. Her previous visit to the castle had been unplanned, and there hadn't been time to do much more than scout the ruins and hurriedly evaluate the situation before other duties demanded her return to Canterlot. Now, though, she could afford to take things slower – take stock of the evidence in greater detail, draw more informed conclusions, and hopefully track the humans back to their other outpost in the Everfree. She already had a good idea of where that might be. For now, though, she'd begin her investigation in earnest on the castle grounds. Luna sat upon the wall and leaned her back against a wind-worn merlon, sinking deep into thought. The castle had fallen – literally – after some sort of battle took place, she believed, but such a feat was beyond any army she knew of. Certainly, it was beyond the deer, no matter how much it may have rankled King Aspen to have outsiders pressing upon Thicket's borders. Beyond any army that I know of... She cast a wary look at the Threshold's wall. But perhaps not beyond humanity. Who knows what means of destruction they may have devised between Discord's time with them and now? Could they have unmade this place themselves? That prospect chilled her worse than the coldest gust of nighttime air. But to what end? I am certain there was a battle, one which went against them. If they destroyed the castle themselves, then it must have been an act of desperation. To deny it to an enemy. Or, perhaps, in the hope that the enemy would be caught in its destruction. Such an act would be suicidal, if the defenders hadn't quit the castle before its demolition. The eastern portcullis was shut, and the west offered no escape with the bridge out. Luna's silver-shod hoof came to rest beneath her chin, shifting as she slowly worked her jaw. If one follows this line of thought... then it begs the question of whether or not there still is a human threat. Perhaps they all perished in the castle's fall – better to die than to surrender. That would be consistent with Discord's description of humanity's warrior ways. A barbarous, nihilistic code of honor might compel them to slay themselves along with their enemy, when hope of victory had fled. Luna scoffed, as much at the thought as at herself for conjuring it. A baseless inference. Think rationally, Luna, think–– From the garden came a roar, and the sound of something striking a metallic surface with great force. "TO HELL WITH YOU, WORTHLESS FLYING PIG! TELL ME, DO THEY MISS YOU AT THE SCRAPYARD?!" The shout, whose accent reminded Luna of the Stalliongrad tongue, came from the garden. Her ears pricked, and she spun around, pressing her body low to the battlement and peering out from behind her merlon. The bladed machine was open – a hatch on its side had pulled apart – and Luna's breath caught as she drank in her first glimpse of a real, living human. The visions Discord had presented her with were dark-skinned, with mops of curly black hair over lean faces with sharp features. This one was very different: pale-skinned, almost white, with close-cropped brown hair and a bristly mustache crawling across his top lip. A dark blue jacket covered his upper body, and khaki trousers his legs. Her muzzle wrinkled. Grotesque as Discord's humans were, they had some kind of intrinsic allure to them. This one was just... rather odd-looking. She supposed that humans came in all colors, shapes, and sizes, the same as all races... but she wouldn't have minded if they all looked the same as the visions. The human stormed out of the bladed machine, his hands curling and uncurling rapidly as his shoulders heaved with deep, rapid breaths. He whirled, and kicked the machine's hull, sending a clang through the air. Then he leaned his back against the machine, drawing a cigarette and lighter from his pocket. Luna watched him smoke, for several minutes, trying and failing to put the scene in some sort of larger context. It was all much too surreal for her. Then, from inside the machine, another voice called out – higher, more nasal, and slightly effeminate. "You okay out there?" "Da," the human snapped. He frowned, and his mustache frowned with him, as he continued to smoke in silence. Then the other voice called out again. "...You ready to give it another shot?" The human didn't answer right away, preferring to take one last long drag from his cigarette. Then he sighed, threw it down, and ground it out with the toe of his boot. "Da," he said resignedly, and he vanished back inside the machine. With a hydraulic hiss, the hatch closed, and Luna gazed out upon an empty, lifeless garden once again. She ducked back behind her merlon and sat bolt-upright, her eyes still wide in bemusement. ...What in the world did I just witness? This added a new dimension to her investigation. Someone had survived whatever confrontation destroyed the castle, and was now trying to activate the bladed machine – or flying pig, which, for all Luna knew, was the machine's proper name. Had they remained on the castle grounds, and weathered its collapse? No, like as not she'd have run into them during her first visit. Did they return to the castle, after the fact, in the hope of salvaging the flying pig? The portcullis was still closed, but the eastern wall could be surmounted with the aid of grapnels or ladders. But she saw no sign of either from the air... Luna's eye was drawn to the Threshold's wall, and her expression shifted into a thoughtful, suspicious frown. The ground between the Threshold, and this wall, is still traversable... and this wall's rubble could easily be scaled, allowing passage to the flying pig... could they have passed through the Threshold recently? Within the last day? That possibility only piled further questions atop the mountain she already had. Were the humans who occupied the castle hostile to Equestria? Were these newcomers allied with them, or opposed? Bother it all, she wouldn't get the answers she needed sitting about on her rump. Luna unfurled her wings, and prepared to swoop down into the garden. A sound from the east made her freeze – the sound of wind shifting, as something sliced rapidly through the air. Like wing-beats, they were, but faster. Hummingbird-quick, yet with far greater size and strength, to make such noise. Luna thought of the blades crowning the machine, and felt the blood drain from her face. The human called it a flying pig for a reason, didn't he? Luna banished any notion of a careful, methodical search from her mind. Luxuriant blue wings snapped, and she soared east, arcing over the curtain wall and following the old road through the forest. It dipped downward, on a gradual slope. As she flew, she passed the corpses of humans stuck with long, thin arrows, projectiles she recognized as having deerish origin. She ignored them. There would be time to inspect those bodies later. The forest opened up to a chasm, and a stone bridge wide enough for twenty ponies to walk abreast. The treeline on the other side of the bridge had been cleared away. Stumps, like gravestones, dotted the ground between the bridge and the low wall of blue stone in the distance. Beyond that wall, Luna knew, there had been a place of worship, built to honor a self-styled god, long before her own time. A place where acolytes led their congregation in acts of scourging and sacrifice to sanctify themselves in the eyes of an emperor who demanded no less than absolute devotion. An abbey, they'd called it. In truth, it was a sprawling monument to the ego of an alicorn tyrant, with a west-facing cathedral as its centerpiece. The ages had not been kind to the abbey, Luna saw, as she landed upon the wall. The complex overlooked by the cathedral was unrecognizable, most of its structures having fallen to rubble. The humans had raised tents in their place, however, forming a city of canvas along the same lines as the original complex, and a few of the original buildings still stood among them. Nestled in the northwestern corner of the abbey were more flying pigs, of a different variety than the one in the castle garden. They were less lean-looking, with no wings, and two sets of blades on a horizontal axis, at their tips and at their tails, as opposed to the smaller, vertical blades on the tail that the first flying pig had. One of the pigs, the source of the sound that drew Luna to the abbey, hovered overhead. Its blades cut through the air faster than the naked eye could track, kicking up a swirling dust storm beneath it. As Luna watched, another flying pig rose into the sky to meet the first, then another, until all of them were airborne. Each one angled its nose northwest, toward a distant, lonely peak. She wasn't certain what to be more alarmed by, though – the flying pigs, or the inside of the cathedral. The western facade was gone, exposing the interior to the nighttime air. Metal catwalks and stairs had been raised inside, running along its walls and criss-crossing between them. Among them all stood a metal dragon, silent and still, gazing out upon the land like a tyrant king. Luna dropped from the wall and spread her wings. There was no time to check on Ponyville; she needed to get home, to warn Celestia. Surely she could outfly the flying pigs; surely she could get enough of a head start to raise the alarm and mobilize the guard. Then they could meet this threat, might even be able to–– Something pricked Luna in the neck, making her jerk, though more in surprise than in pain. She touched the spot, her hoof coming into contact with something soft poking out of her skin. With a flare of magic, she pulled the offending object free, and held it to eye level. A tiny, pointed dart, tipped by red feathers, slowly rotated in front of Luna's face. With a sinking feeling, Luna realized what it was, just as another pricked her in her neck. There was a sudden rush of air to Luna's right, and the almost imperceptible sound of earth and grass shifting beneath feet. Luna kicked off the ground, her wings carrying her backward, as a hand chopped cleanly through the spot where her neck had been an instant before. She landed, unharmed, but her hooves felt shaky beneath her weight, and her legs trembled faintly. Her wings started to droop, and her eyelids felt heavy; she fought to keep both open. In front of her stood another human... or something humanesque. It wore no clothes, save a bulky vest, shredded and melted, that covered its upper body. Beneath the vest, its skin was blue, darker tones at the middle of its body, lighter shades creeping along its limbs. Its face was a mask of scorched, stained, dented metal, with a cracked glass eye in its center. The fingers of its right hand were held in perfectly straight alignment, like a knife's blade; its left hand held a matte-black object that Luna recognized as some kind of firearm. A pistol – yes, that was the parlance the minotaurs used. The assailant gripped the top of the pistol and slid it back, ejecting something from its innards, before it clicked back into place. Luna's magic pulled the second dart from her neck. She dropped it to the ground, and crushed it beneath her rapidly numbing hoof. She tried to speak a word of challenge, but couldn't work her tongue – it felt like a thick, lifeless worm in her mouth. Whatever those darts contained was working its way through her system rapidly, doing in moments what a quarter-empty flask of potent brandy could not. The human-thing rushed her, a streak of blue, too fast to be seen. Luna lurched away clumsily, barely ducking under another swing at her neck. A jolt of lightning crackled from her horn, striking her enemy in its exposed underarm. She thought she heard a cry of pain, before a third dart stung her in the hollow of her neck. The first two darts had weakened Luna; the third was all but crippling. Her head felt light, her thoughts grew hazy, and her vision swam with mist and shadows. Even the shape of the human's body was beginning to grow indistinct. But Luna still had the presence of mind to realize that her fight was folly – the human-thing had gotten the drop on her, tilting the odds in its favor from the outset. Luna couldn't waste time fighting a losing battle, not when she needed to escape. Not when Canterlot still needed to be warned. So Luna spread her wings and beat them furiously, fighting against fatigue to gain height and soaring over the head of the human-thing. Then fingers caught the end of her tail, and Luna despaired. She had the presence of mind to attempt an escape, but not to avoid flying over the head of her assailant. The human-thing swung Luna's body down like a mace, smashing her against the ground with bone-shattering force. The drugs prevented Luna from feeling the full brunt of the blow – she felt the impact, felt her ribs crunching, but she was too insensate to feel the pain of it. Then, with a shove, she was rolling backward, onto hard stone. Luna struggled to gather her hooves beneath herself, and wrenched her eyes open. Through the haze, and the darkness, she saw the human-thing, standing on solid ground. Beneath Luna was the bridge, and on either side, the chasm yawned. "You are not where I thought you'd be," said the human-thing. Its voice of sand and broken glass rang clearly through Luna's stupor. "I had not predicted that you would leave Canterlot, much less that you would turn up here and now. Just what could have brought you so far out at this late juncture?" Luna couldn't form a reply – and the human-thing seemed to come to a conclusion anyway, as it gazed at the hill behind her. "...I see. Perhaps that was an error on my part – my curiosity winning out against my common sense. But fortune has resolved the matter to my satisfaction." Its feet padded noiselessly as it strode forward to join Luna on the bridge. "Indeed, had I only known you alicorns were so easy to kill, had I the time to factor it into my simulation, I might have saved myself a great deal of trouble." Luna lifted her head, but the human-thing slammed its palm into her temple and drove her back into the stone bridge with a gasp. "I'm tempted to keep you alive," the human-thing said, its voice infuriatingly calm and casual as it pinned Luna's face to the ground. "It may be prudent to interrogate you, to determine the extent to which my plans have been compromised. If you are out here, if you know of our presence, then there is reason to suspect your sister does as well. But the risks outweigh the rewards, and I have taken enough risks today already." Its hand left her head, only to be replaced by the sole of its foot. There was no pain as it pressed down on Luna's skull – only a pressure, building rapidly. "Farewell, 'Nightmare Moon.' Your reputation outshines you, I regret to say." The mention of that discarded title sent a dagger of fury through the younger princess, straight through to a reservoir of emotion that she'd long ago boarded over. She let it spill forth, let it fuel her, bringing her clarity through clouds of confusion. The pulse of magic she fired off was unfocused, undirected – just a wave of raw energy from her horn whose force resonated deep in her chest and rattled her teeth in her head. It was sufficient to rocket the human-thing away from her, off the bridge, and into the abbey's outermost wall. It recovered quickly, and glared at Luna as it lifted the pistol again. Fortune saved Luna from a fourth dart. The pulse of magic had broken the mortar holding the bridge together. Stonework that had survived through the ages gave way, and Luna tumbled with it into the chasm below. Weightless, she fell. Her wings wouldn't work, and her legs obeyed none of her commands. Ever the treasonous devils, those legs. The sky was a ribbon of studded purple between two granite walls, falling farther and farther away, until Luna plunged into the water at the ravine's bottom. She felt her head break the surface and her lungs work to suck down gulps of fresh, clear air – all automatic, for her addled mind was very much elsewhere. A roaring hearth, a soft bed, a nuzzle at the back of her ear... No. No, there's something I should be doing right now. I need to see my sister, I need to tell her... need to warn her... The nuzzling became more insistent, and Luna smiled. ...But, she thought, as darkness and fog claimed her, surely it can keep for a while.