Alicornae: The Legend of Starlit Sky
Part II - Chapter 7: A Long Story
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Starlit’s first thought was confusion, followed by sheer terror. She let out a cry that lengthened into a scream as she flailed impotently on the floor, swinging at creatures that were no longer there. Her legs felt leaden and her mind doubly so, but she remembered the pain all too well.
“Starlit!” Sun called as he tried to hold her down. “Starlit, you need to calm down! You’re safe now!”
A well placed kick to the stomach threw Sun off of her, and Starlit crawled away as fast as her sluggish body would carry her until she hit a corner of masonry. She curled up as tight as she could, shuddering from panic and bewilderment. She ran her hooves over every square inch of her body, searching for the innumerable wounds she had incurred just moments before.
“This isn’t real, this can’t be real,” Starlit muttered to herself. “This is all just a nightmare.”
As thoroughly as she searched, Starlit couldn’t find a single cut or scrape anywhere on her dusky blue fur. She felt her left eye and found not an empty socket filled with gore but a full, round eye with a gleaming teal iris. Even her mane was in good condition, with its periwinkle blue strands reflecting back the orange light of a campfire.
“Starlit,” Sun croaked from across the room. Swiftly she swung her head around to see her traveling companion, the pony she had deserted when he needed her, standing before her. He looked worse for wear, with the hem of his cloak torn and covered in dust and a fair few scrapes as well.
The tears fell from her face before she could think to stop them. With as much speed as she could muster she ran over to him and flung her forelegs around his neck in a tight embrace, tighter than any hug she’d ever given. She needed to hold somepony else, somepony that would help ground her shattered mind.
“I’m sorry Sun!” Starlit wailed, a throaty cry of deep, heartfelt regret. “I’m so sorry!”
Sun returned the embrace as Starlit sobbed into his shoulder. She was easily a decade his senior, but in that moment she may as well have been a child cradled in her grandmother’s hooves. Neither said anything until Starlit finally composed herself. Her face was stricken with tears and she was still hiccuping, but she felt better all the same.
“Starlit, what happened to you?” Sun asked, his voice soft and soothing to her ears. “If you’re not ready to talk about it, then I understand, but something happened to you.”
“S-Sun, just let m-me talk first,” Starlit stammered. She breathed in and out in a steady rhythm until she found she could speak again, although the fear and panic hadn't yet left. Sun sat patiently as she steeled her resolve.
“Sun, what did I look like when you found me?" Starlit asked, her voice still thick from her sobbing.
"Pristine," Sun answered quizzically. "You looked like you had passed out from running. I did wonder how your armor got torn apart, but didn't think too much of it."
"Was… was there any blood? Signs of a fight?"
"A lot of the dust had been disturbed around you, but other than that it was just you, your gear, and your sword laying by your head. It had blood on it, but it looked too thick to be yours."
Starlit's gaze flitted around the room as she pondered what Sun said. The pain, the wounds, it had all seemed so real, it was real. She had felt it all, and hazy though it was she even remembered the darkness of death as the thestrals ground her to pulp.
Unconsciously Starlit reached to feel the amulet hanging around her neck. The leather string was completely intact and the black stone felt warm to the touch. Once she realized what she was doing she reflexively tore it off and threw it across the room, narrowly missing Sun's head.
"Woah!" Sun yelped as he dodged the necklace.
"Sorry Sun, I wasn't aiming for you," Starlit hastily apologized.
"Starlit, you're not making any sense," Sun replied. "I understand that you're freaked out from the thestral attack, but I need you to talk to me. What happened to you?"
Starlit stared at Sun. The firelight illuminated his green eyes as they cast a worried expression back at her, and Starlit knew that she couldn't lie about something of this magnitude. Not to him, and not to herself.
"Sun," Starlit said, "I think I died."
The words hung in the air, interrupted only by the crackling of the fire. The pair stared at each other, and Starlit wondered if she had just made a horrible mistake.
"Starlit, I need you to tell me everything that happened after we got separated," Sun said, his voice rigid and authoritative in a way Starlit hadn't heard from him.
"After what I did, you deserve that much at least," Starlit replied, "and maybe a little more."
Starlit settled onto her belly in front of the fire, letting its heat warm her sore muscles as she found her words to begin her story. She hadn't told anyone this particular story, and she wasn't a great wordsmith to begin with. Sun quickly joined her by the fire, his face set into a focused countenance.
"I'll get to when we got separated in good time," Starlit said, "but I think it's high time you understood my 'problem' with thestrals. If not for abandoning you like I did, then at least so you understand me a little better and so that I can get this off of my chest."
"When I was a little filly, my parents died on the road connecting my small settlement of Stone Shore to the neighboring town of Ponyville. I couldn't have been any older than five, and at the time I didn't understand why I had to go live with my grandmother. She was a sweet old mare, but it was a long time before I understood why I went to live with her. In hindsight I suppose I was a little slow for my age, but that's neither here nor there."
"While the cause of my parents' deaths was never properly determined, the word 'thestral' kept cropping up whenever adults discussed the matter around me or my grandmother. Nonnie tried to shield me from the truth for as long as she could, but after a while the term became associated with my parents going away. That was the genesis of all of this, I suppose, but it wasn't the tipping point into my fear of them now."
Starlit swallowed deeply, trying to fight back the mounting thickness in her voice. It was a hard memory to recall, and she had tried to bury it for years. Thinking about it now, with the terror of thestrals so fresh in her mind, was threatening to send her into another panic attack.
"One day, when I was fifteen or so, Nonnie and I were walking home from the market. She lived near the outskirts of town, you see. Most of the ponies in town said she was crazy for living so far out of the way, said that she was going to get robbed or attacked by wild animals. She brushed them off and so did I; she'd lived out there for years with no incident, why should it start that day?"
"The thing about irony is that it has a bad sense of timing. I spotted them first, about a quarter-mile off. There was a trio of them, two pegasi and a unicorn, and they were trying to break my grandmother's warding lines."
"Warding lines?" Sun asked. "I thought you said there was no magic where you came from."
"I said that there was practically no magic where I came from, but there's still a little," Starlit replied, happy for the brief diversion. "Warding is about the most sophisticated magic a unicorn can muster where I'm from and even then it takes an entire family to cover an area the size of, say, Cherry Blossom's saloon back in Appleoosa."
"And your elderly grandmother managed it all by herself?" Sun asked again with increasing incredulity.
"She did have me to help, and our 'house' was more of a shack. There wasn't much ground to cover, so it only took the two of us."
"But I digress," Starlit said before continuing the story. "The thestrals initially didn't take notice of us. Faster than I'd ever seen her move Nonnie dragged me off into the scrub by the side of the road behind a particularly large rock. She told me to stay still and silent, and I did."
Though she'd been fighting it off well enough, Starlit's voice caught in her throat. It took her a moment to speak again, and when she did she was choking the words out rather than saying them.
"She left me, behind the rock. S-she left me and went to go distract them, get them away from the lines. I wanted to chase after her, b-but I had to do what she told me. I was young, and stupid, a-and… and—"
A fresh wave of sobs wracked Starlit's body as she silently cursed herself. She cursed herself for not being able to hold it together, cursed herself for not trying to help Sun, and even for not helping her grandmother when she needed her.
"Starlit, it's alright, I get it," Sun said, stroking the back of her hoof as he did. "If you want, you can skip this par—"
"They tore her to p-pieces, Sun!" Starlit interjected. "Ripped her from h-head to tail and everything in between and I didn't do anything to stop them! I j-just ran, ran like a coward back down the road."
"I could hear their screeches, and t-then their hoofbeats when they started chasing me. I ran as fast as I could off the road and into the woods where I thought I could lose them. I was so terrified, I r-ran into a bear cave to av-void them. A bear cave, Sun! That's probably the most dangerous place I could've picked, but ev-ven that seemed like a better shot than dealing with those monsters."
Starlit started hyperventilating and her tears stopped falling as they ran dry in her eyes. It took a while to compose herself, but Sun waited for her to finish her tale with patience befitting a stallion of knowledge and study.
"Miraculously, the musk from the bears must've masked my scent, as when the thestrals came to the mouth of the cave they slowed down. I could only see them from between the cracks of the rock formation I was hiding behind, but they looked confused. They sniffed around the cave to try and find my scent, but they weren't able to."
"Those few minutes behind those rocks were, and still are, the most nerve-wracking moments of my life. A single minute stretched into an eternity, but eventually they gave up the chase and departed. I stayed behind in the cave for an hour, maybe longer, just to make sure they weren't going to come back for me."
"I never went back to my grandmother's house, not even when the ponies in town went to collect her body. There was a nice ceremony for her, and after that I bounced around from neighbor to neighbor until I came of age. When they say it takes a village to raise a child I don't think they meant it literally, but in my case it was. After that I worked odd jobs to save up enough for my own home, and… I'm sure you can assume the rest."
Starlit's head drooped as she finished the first part of her story. Combined with her death and all the questions that were floating around her head, she was emotionally and mentally drained.
"Starlit, that's… that's one of the saddest things I've ever heard," Sun said, his voice barely passing a stunned whisper. "I thought I had it bad, but this just…"
"That's the thing about pain," Starlit replied. "It's all relative; to you, who only lost his parents when a Queen summoned them to her palace, my story seems like a tragedy beyond measure. But at least I know what happened of my family, whereas you've only been given rumors and here-say about what could've become of them."
"Yeah, nothing but here-say," Sun repeated. "I guess we both had awful childhoods, huh?"
"So it would seem, but at least I have you to commiserate with," Starlit answered with a tired smile.
"Thank goodness for small miracles," Sun replied. "If you want to rest then go right ahead, I've got a bedroll laid out. I'll keep watch, and you can tell me what happened after we got separated when you're in a better headspace."
Starlit began to protest but then thought better of it. Sleep, true sleep, would be a welcome comfort right now. While she had been sluggish when she woke up, she only just now noticed how she wanted to fall into a heap.
"Thank you, Sun," Starlit replied as she laid down on Sun's bedroll. "I think that would help."
Though threadbare, the coarse wool of the pillow may as well have been made of satin and duck down to her weary head. Sleep came swiftly, and mercifully it was a deep, black, dreamless sleep.
* * *
Starlit stirred at the sound of flint striking against steel. Slowly she rose, every joint cracking as she got up to find Sun making another fire as the previous one had died down. She didn't feel good necessarily, but she felt balanced after a hard-earned slumber.
She was then decidedly unbalanced when a small weight tugged at her neck.
With surprising swiftness Starlit reached up to her neck to find the black stone amulet was hanging off of her neck once again, still slightly warm to the touch and the leather cord unsnapped.
"Oh, you're awake," Sun said as the fire flared to life.
"Sun, did you fix this necklace?" Starlit asked. "It's the one I threw at you when I first woke up."
"No…" Sun answered. "What's with that necklace, anyway? When I found you your armor was torn to shreds and your saddlebags had taken a beating, but that rock was as pristine as when we left Undersand."
"It was a gift from my benefactor," Starlit replied, "the pony who charged me with this mission. She said it would protect me or something of that description, but I think it has a darker purpose than that."
"What do you mean? What has it done?"
"As far as I can tell, it's the reason I'm alive," Starlit answered as she took the necklace off and put it near the firelight. "When the thestrals were upon me it started to glow with gray light and beat like a drum, and when I woke up it felt warm when I touched it."
"Hmm…" Sun murmured. He was casting a critical gaze at the amulet, trying to pry answers out of its smooth black surface. "Has it done anything else?"
"Just one other thing; when I felt the blood in Applejack's room after her kidnapping it sent me into a vision where I saw the event unfold., and after I killed one of the thestrals its body sent me into another vision of it chasing me and me killing it."
"That's… highly irregular," Sun replied. He snatched the stone up and stared at it intensely.
"Sun, I don't think you should be handling that stone, it's not safe," Starlit said.
"Just, give me a second, I want to confirm something," Sun answered. "I have a spell that might be able to tell me where this thing came from."
If Starlit's body weren't still sore and sluggish she might've been able to stop him, but she couldn't take the necklace back before Sun put it around his own neck and illuminated his horn. The pale green light of his magic enveloped the stone in full as he cast his spell on it, followed by a near blinding flash of grey light.
When Starlit blinked away the spots in her vision she saw Sun, head snapped back at a painful angle with grey light pouring from his eyes and mouth. The stone was floating off of his chest as if it were suspended in water, and Sun's cloak and mane were similarly floating.
"Sun!" Starlit yelled. She shot over to him and clamped her teeth down on the leather strap holding the necklace together. She yanked at it with all her might, but it refused to budge. The leather ground in her teeth but didn't give way.
As she pulled and bit and desperately tried to get Sun free of the necklace's grasp she began to hear sounds; whispers and echoes of voices playing out from Sun's open mouth, all too garbled to try and make sense of.
"C'mon, dammit!" Starlit exclaimed through gritted teeth. The voices began to mount in volume as Starlit redoubled her efforts, but still the strap refused to give way. It was only when the noise had grown to a cacophonous crescendo that the lights faded, the voices stopped, and the necklace fell limp in Starlit's mouth. With a final tug she snapped the leather strap and let it drop to the floor.
As soon as the necklace left him Sun slumped to the floor, his face barely missing the fire. He twitched and shuddered on the ground for a few moments before regaining control of his faculties.
"Sun! Sun, you idiot, why did you do that?!" Starlit reprimanded. Sun's eyes spun around in their sockets for a moment before focusing on Starlit, and he slowly pulled himself back up to a sitting position.
"That rock, or necklace," Sun began, "is not what I thought it was."
"What in Equestria did you think it was?!" Sun snapped back. "What could it possibly have been to be able to resurrect the dead?"
"I've… heard of magic like this," Sun answered as he slumped against the back wall to catch his breath. "Something about… being able to revivify a recently… dead body, or one that's on the brink of death, but this… this is something far more powerful."
Starlit felt like she could slap him for what he just did, but she knew her anger was just born of worry. Swallowing the verbal tirade she wanted to unleash against him, she instead sat across from him.
"Well, if it isn't what you thought it was, then what is it?"
"It's hard to explain," Sun answered. "I feel like I just… saw all of history at once… but in bits and pieces. Some parts it… were focused on a farmer… in other parts I saw a castle, but all of it… flew by so fast."
"But moreover," Sun continued, regaining some of his speaking skill, "I felt a strong presence throughout the entire process. It felt like a large weight pressing on my mind, directing me to the places it wanted me to see. I saw all of what happened when we got separated, for instance, but it skipped over centuries of time before that."
With hesitation Sun and Starlit both turned their heads to look back at the small black stone sitting next to the fire. The leather strap had repaired itself in the time it took for Sun to explain what happened.
"Whoever gave you that entrusted you with a lot of power, Starlit," Sun said. "I'd keep it safe."
"But why?" Starlit protested. "That rock's brought me nothing but confusion and misery ever since I got it, why should I hang onto it?"
"Because whoever gave it to you obviously didn't want it falling into the wrong hooves, and in doing so they gave you what ponies have been seeking out since we could comprehend our own existence; immortality, and the sum total of all knowledge across all of history."
Starlit stared at the necklace, it's polished black surface reflecting the flickering campfire. Even though she wasn't wearing it she could feel it's weight around her neck. She didn't like it, this feeling of connection and detachment.
With a gentle hoof she lifted it up, letting its soft weight fall to her chest. It was now as cool as the ambient stone of the room, and it didn't thump its asynchronous beat.
"I'd very much like to meet this 'benefactor' of yours," Sun said as he dragged himself to a standing position. "If she has access to magical artifacts of this caliber the she and I would have a lot to talk about."
"I know that I'll be having a talk with her when we're done here, that's for damn su—"
Starlit was soon cut off by the sound of horns blaring down the hallway outside the room. The sound rang around the room with a deafening echo, causing Sun and herself to clamp their hooves over their ears.
"Starlit Sky of Stone Shore and Setting Sun of Appleoosa," a deep, bombastic voice declared from nowhere and everywhere at once, "you have been deemed fit to receive an invitation to Her Majesty, Queen Celestia the Radiant's, court. A detachment of the Solar Guard will be with you presently."
The declaration left as swiftly as it had come, leaving Starlit and Sun dumbfounded. Quickly they gathered up their belongings in preparation for their escorts. Thinking it a tad coincidental that the amulet being activated and their invitation happening within ten minutes of each other, Starlit stowed the necklace away in her bags.
Sun had just finished dowsing the campfire when a large doorway of shimmering golden light appeared on the rear wall of the room. Out of it stepped a pair of muscular stallions resplendent in golden and white armor, as well as a portly earth pony wearing clothes of rich orange fabric.
"Setting Sun and Starlit Sky, I presume?" the earth pony asked.
"Yes, that is us," Starlit answered, doing her level best to mask her confusion and the lingering fear she still had. "And you are?"
"Oh, there will be time for introductions later," The earth pony replied," you are to be brought before the Queen at once! Pip, pip, come along then," he added, beckoning them towards the portal.
With a hesitant step forward Sun went through first, followed quickly by the earth pony and, finally, Starlit. The sensation of transport was much more pleasant than when Twilight had sent her halfway across the country, and the end goal far more awe inspiring.
When she exited the portal, followed closely by the armored guards, Starlit saw a room larger than the whole of her hometown. Every surface gleamed with polish, from the mirror-like golden floor to the towering alabaster columns supporting the glass encased roof. The effect was actually hard on the eyes, and she even noticed Sun blinking a few times when he looked around the room.
The centerpiece of the massive chamber was the raised dais at the far end, which the portly earth pony was ushering them towards.
"Come, come," he chided playfully, "mustn't keep Her Majesty waiting."
They moved down the room at an even pace, and Starlit found herself winded by the end. They were flanked on both sides by two columns of guards, who were staring off into the middle distance as Starlit moved past. She still felt like they were watching her with hawk-like focus.
The dias was even more resplendent up close; a lavish orange carpet stretched from the marble steps all the way up to the opulent throne that sat atop the dais. Behind the throne itself a large diorama of orbs suspended on rings spun, all attached to a large representation of the sun.
But more than all of that, Starlit found herself humbled by the sight of the mare seated upon the throne. She was the height of two full grown mares, with a coat of gleaming white and a rainbow mane that floated off of her head as if it were constantly being blown by a gentle breeze. Her golden regalia of a collar, horseshoes, and plated armor gleamed and glinted brighter than her throne room, and the crown seated upon her head was topped by an orange gemstone the size of Starlit's eyeball.
What drew Starlit's gaze the most, however, were the Queen's eyes. They were a pale purple and, much like Twilight's, they harbored centuries of rulership and experience. They stared down at Starlit and Sun with a measure of regal grace and, paradoxically for a sun queen, cold indifference.
"Your Majesty," the portly pony announced with a low bow, "I present to you Starlit Sky of Stone Shore and Setting Sun of Appleoosa."
Taking the hint, Starlit and Sun also bowed, although Starlit did her best to keep her eyes on the Queen as she descended from her throne.
"You may rise," Celestia said when she reached the bottom of her dais, her voice flowing like water. "Thank you for your swift service, Gilded Heart, that will be all."
Without another word of prompting the portly pony rose and pranced back down the cavernous room, leaving Starlit and Sun alone with the Queen and her retinue of guards.
Celestia looked the pair over for a moment, and Starlit couldn't help but feel like a cornered mouse. Sun looked even worse than she felt, as he refused to meet Celestia's gaze.
"Welcome to Sunspire, Starlit Sky and Setting Sun," Celestia said with a genteel air. "I believe you have some business with me?"
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