My Little Halo: Harmony Evolved

by Arcane Howitzer


8: Dim Before Dawn


Outpost Epsilon
23 November 2551 0700 MST
Viery Plateaus, Reach

It was an unnaturally cool day in the Viery region. This had become more or less normal over the past two months as the pegasi of the Guam made their presence known to the local climate. Most meteorologists were fairly certain that it would snap back once the “corrupting” influence was removed, but no one had any idea what the long-term consequences would be, if there even would be any. Overall, everyone who knew and cared about it was breathing a sigh of relief as the crewponies were finally given authorization to return to active duty, particularly the crews of four orbital MAC stations that had no idea why they were having a half-a-month-long readiness drill.
As Princess Celestia watched the various ponies scramble about, loading various pieces of equipment onto cargo shuttles for transit to the Guam, she couldn’t help but reminisce on her time with the humans and their pony counterparts. Most of that time had been spent teaching the unicorns, but there had actually been a surprising amount of room in her schedule, particularly since she didn’t have to worry about her royal duties. Not that she didn’t worry about her duties- her empty moments were spent agonizing over whether Luna was able to pick up the significant slack she was suddenly left with- but she knew that such matters were beyond her reach, at least for now.
Here, however, she could help. The humans-turned-ponies had very little idea of the full extent of their magic. And who could blame them? Until very recently, magic had no place in the common vocabulary, and was relegated to the realm of fantasy. Now it was an inseparable part of their very being, and they had no idea how to use it. Luckily, they all seemed to possess an innate instinct about magic that more than made up for the lack of experience. It was perhaps the only reason the unicorns had learned how to use their own magic so fast.
The remainder of her time, Celestia attempted to take in the sights and sounds of this new universe. The skies above Reach were filled with impossibly bright stars in constant motion, things the humans claimed to have put there themselves. “Orbital stations” they had called them. Even during the day, things could be seen shooting through the skies, impossible in their size, speed, and height. They occasionally ventured near enough for a low rumble to be heard, but most stayed near the horizon unless they were bringing supplies to the outpost.
Due to being allowed to watch certain video clips of the war, she had also gotten an earful of gunshots and screaming, as well as getting a better idea of what she had committed Equestria to in a fit of emotion. She was horrified, not only at the sheer scale of the destruction the humans had been subjected to, but at the brutality the Covenant used even on their own forces. At multiple points, she had seen the big creatures the humans labeled “elites,” the same race as the beast in the video Captain Arnold had first shown her, actually kill the smaller “grunts” who refused to charge blindly to their deaths. They were obviously a slave race, used mostly for cannon fodder, and Celestia pitied them.
She also saw the other races that made up the Covenant, each with its own human-given moniker. The insectoid Drones and rampaging Brutes made sense, though the Jackals confused her, until she found a clip depicting several of them fighting over scraps from a smashed tank like a pack of dogs. Her attention was captured by the nigh-unstoppable Hunters, armored behemoths which towered over everything else and shrugged off all but the most vicious of strikes. Her eye was particularly drawn to the runes carved into their armor. When she had asked about them, she was told that they were just symbols put there for religious purposes. Apparently, they were used by an extinct alien race known only as the Forerunners, which were the focus of the Covenant’s religion, so it would make sense that the mad aliens would put them on everything. Still…
Her reverie was broken by a passing crewpony telling her that it was time to leave. A shuttle similar to the one she had been ferried around in on her first day was waiting for her at the air strip on the edge of the base, although this one had windows. She wasn’t sure if this was better, being able to see what was beyond the walls of the “moving room,” or worse, having two senses screaming at her to slow down instead of just one, but she had been soundly laughed at when she offered to fly beside the craft, and when they realized she was serious, they explained that their destination was actually in space. She would gladly have teleported there, but she had no idea where in space.
Reluctantly, she climbed aboard, along with the captain, several members of the bridge crew, and the five-pony team of ODST which had apparently been ordered to follow her everywhere she went, and within minutes they were airborne. When she had tried to fly around previously, she was followed up by one of the humans’ vehicles and told to land, so this was her first real look at what the humans called the Viery Plateaus. It probably would have been breathtaking, had the sight of it moving so fast without the familiar sensation of the wind in her mane not made her slightly queasy. By the time she overcame her motion sickness, the sky was turning black as though night had come early (though, given Reach’s twenty-seven hour day, that would have been a welcome change of pace).
Now that they were beyond the obscuring atmosphere, Celestia could see the forms behind those bright stars for herself. It was truly a sight to behold; Masses of steel and glass, many dwarfing Canterlot Castle in size, sprawled out with no regard for something as insignificant as up or down. Each was bathed in its own star field of lights to paint it out against the backdrop of space, for the benefit of the hundreds of smaller craft which flitted about them like insects, or, in the case of some of the larger “small” crafts which themselves dwarfed the smaller of the stations, like massive birds of prey.
The videos had shown enough of the UNSC fleet for her to recognize which of the ships and stations before her were built around the frightening weapon known as the Magnetic Acceleration Cannon. Those videos had never shown it in action, but what she had heard of it was terrifying enough. Speed comparable to light itself, force enough to bring a city to ruin, and size that almost necessitated keeping it where little her world had to offer could even reach made it one of the most frightening things she had ever even heard of.
She could see no less than a hundred of them from her vantage point in a suddenly very feeble feeling box.
Suddenly, after perhaps half an hour of staring out at this piece of the heavens the humans had claimed for their own, the view was rather abruptly cut off by a wall of metal. A speaker that had thus far remained unnoticed blared to life with the words “Making final approach to Guam docking port seventeen-Alpha.” The shuttle slowed to a stop just as a hatch in the metal wall drifted into view. The voice behind the speaker stated that it was “engaging magnetic locks,” as they began drifting purposefully towards the hatch. There was a loud clunk and some hissing, and the door opened to reveal a long corridor strikingly similar to the ones she had been forcibly escorted through just last month. Was that really only a month ago? It seems like such a long time.
The crew filed out, and Celestia followed them. She intended to keep following them, eager to see parts of a ship that weren’t the brig, but at two-story junction centered around a stairwell, the captain stopped and turned to her.
“The squad will escort you to your quarters, and will keep an eye on you if you decide to wander around. Don’t get in anyone’s way, and if someone tells you to do something, you do it. They probably know more about what’s going on than you do, and I will not have the first diplomatic escort mission in centuries be ruined because you decided to stick your head in the fusion plant. We’ll be leaving within the hour.” He trotted off towards the bridge, and Celestia reluctantly followed the ODST deeper into the ship.

Captain Arnold strode onto the bridge several minutes later, quickly taking in all of the changes made to accommodate their new bodies. All of the stations’ old keyboard interfaces were replaced with holographic touchscreen displays which, ironically enough, didn’t recognize “magic” as a possible interface method. While other ponies could use the new interface more easily than the keyboards, most of the bridge crew were unicorns, and had spent the past two weeks perfecting the art of pushing keys with magic. Luckily, everyone seemed to have gotten the hang of things fairly easily. The only other change of note was that all of the chairs had been removed, and replaced with low stools more accommodating to their new form of sitting.
As he approached his command chair-I suppose it’s more of a command stool now- He was greeted by a barrage of readiness reports.
“All equipment loaded and stored.”85% of personnel onboard.”
“Fusion plant operating at optimal capacity.”
“Weapons systems online.”
“FTL drive up and running.”
Zzzzptaft “Communications station still unresponsive to magic, but otherwise working fine.”
The captain rolled his eyes at that last report, and sat down at his own station. He actually had very little to do until the final preparations for the slipspace jump, which would need authorization from his neural lace, and he spent this time puzzling how fast the situation had moved. Though he had spent enough time with the princess to know that she was almost naively trustworthy, he also knew that his superiors didn’t have that personal accounting. He had, of course forwarded his own impressions of her with their progress reports, but for High Command to give the go-ahead to attempt to open diplomatic relations with Equestria seemed somewhat rushed for there not to be some alternate angle. Perhaps they’re just that desperate for some good new to tell the press. Hell, they’d know better than any of us how much we need a real morale booster.
Next, his thoughts turned to the many ways this vital operation could go wrong. Aside from the myriad of ways the unwary could get themselves killed aboard a military vessel, the main concern was with actually entering the universe that had had such a drastic effect on the crew merely through unintentional proximity. The princess had mentioned numerous other sentient species, most of which seemed to originate from human mythology, and the idea of enduring another transformation was not pleasant. Oh well. We’ll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it.

Canterlot Caverns
November 29, 2011 11:27 P.M. Canterlot Local Time
Canterlot, Equestria

Guardian Shield was enjoying his retirement. How couldn’t he? No more duties. No more patrolling. No more having to stay in peak condition on the off chance he was needed. Just relaxation and occasional severe migraines.
Every day his children would come in and join him for dinner. It was always the highlight of his day, given how much he loved them. What were their names again? ARG, my head. Oh well. I suppose memory was always the second thing to go. Ah, here they are now. Wait, didn’t they just leave?
Indeed, there was something different about the ponies entering his room now. In fact, he would have said that they weren’t his children if it weren’t for the fact that they were the only ponies who ever came to see him. Just looking at them made his head hurt, a sensation that redoubled when one of them said “There you are, sir!” Why did that voice sound so familiar? He barely recognized his own kids whenever they arrived.
Suddenly, one of those ponies that made his head hurt lashed out with a double-hoofed buck. Shield tried to jump out of the way, but found that he couldn’t move. Why can’t I move? When was the last time I tried? He closed his eyes to brace against both the debilitating pain in his head, and the future pain rocketing towards his chest.
CRACK
Experiencing no additional pain, he dared to open his eyes. There were cracks everywhere, as though the air in front of him had been struck with a bludgeon, and through the cracks he could see something else. Before he could make out what it was, however, the pain in his head redoubled as if it were trying to distract him from what he was seeing. So horrible was the pain that he didn’t even notice the pony before him launch another buck. He didn’t see the vision of his bedroom, the only world he had known for who knows how long, shatter to reveal a dark cave and a broken cocoon. The only thing he knew was pain, and he would do anything to make it stop.
And suddenly, it did.
He opened his eyes and saw the first truly familiar face he had seen in far too long. It took him a few seconds to recall the memories, like that part of his brain had been disused, but he eventually got a pony to go with that face. Nightshield was a low-ranking unicorn of the newly-reformed Lunar Guard, and thus Guardian Shield, as a sergeant in the Solar Guard, had had few chances to meet the stallion. In fact, were it not for the combining of the two branches after Celestia’s disappearance, they would never have met. As it was, he didn’t know much about Nightshield other than his name and relatively new status as part of the guard.
Looking around the room, he was glad to find a face he was somewhat more familiar with. Shimmer Shape was a well-known and well respected member of the Canterlot City Guard, due to her mastery of personal illusionary magic and knack for infiltrating any closed criminal circle which happened to pop up in the city. She wasn’t a public figure, for obvious reasons, but any guard worth his spear had heard of her exploits. They also knew that she had a tendency to change her personal appearance even when not under cover, and she was currently a beige color with a brownish mane and tail, and a cutie mark of a blurry, vaguely pony-shaped figure.
The rest of the small room seemed to have been dug out of bare stone. Aside from a waxy-looking door, a similarly waxy sconce holding a green-glowing crystal, and the shards of his former prison, it was more or less featureless.
“Are you okay, sir?” asked Nightshield. “It looked like the mind-control was hitting you pretty hard there.”
“No, no. I’m fine,” he responded, shaking his head slightly in hopes of getting his brain to speed up. “Where am I, and how long have I been here?”
“It’s been over two weeks since you were captured in the first assault,” Shimmer Shape replied curtly. “The changelings captured everypony they could get their hooves on and took them into the caverns in the mountain. You’ve all been cocooned and hypnotized in here the entire time while they fed off of your love.”
“But you’re here now, so we must have beaten them off.” He was hoping he wouldn’t have to fight his way out of a changeling hive, but he knew better. Shimmer Shape wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t a danger of discovery. His suspicion was confirmed by what she said next.
“Sorry, but no. This is a rescue mission. The changelings have captured too many guards for us to fight them effectively, so we were sent in to get you out. Now hurry up; there aren’t many more rooms for us to go through.” They all trotted out of the cell, and into a vast cavern filled with what seemed to be most of the Canterlot guard. Along the walls, sometimes layered nine or ten high, were more doors, leading to more cells, most of which were open andempty. After a few minutes of waiting the last few cells were emptied Shimmer put up illusions around herself and Nightshield which made them look like changeling soldiers, and turned to address the crowd. “Alright everypony, if you see a changeling, put on a vacant expression and let me do the talking. This is the tricky part, but I’ve already got a plan worked out.” And with that, the group of escapees started moving.
The caverns inside Canterlot Mountain were large, twisting affairs filled with magnificent crystal formations. Occasionally, one could see remnants of the mining industry that Canterlot had been founded on, but since Celestia had declared the caverns a natural wonder and enforced their protection several centuries past, most of the equipment had long since rotted away. More obvious were the signs of changeling occupation. Large waxy bridges spanned otherwise-impassible gaps, and a low droning noise echoed off of the walls. Many smaller crystals had apparently been broken off to provide the wall lights, and the group sometimes glimpsed carts full of sharpened gemstones being pushed with single-minded efficiency by changeling workers.
Though those workers didn’t dare interrupt the task of the soldier Shimmer had taken the form of, eventually they came across a changeling of sufficient rank to find their activities suspicious.
“Halt!” Guardian Shield couldn’t see the changeling that had spoken, but whoever it was sounded very intimidating, and not the kind of intimidating where you try to look like you have more power than you actually do. This was the kind of intimidating that spoke of real power and the will to use it. “Why are all of these prisoners not in their cells?”
“High Commander Blackfang, sir! There was a gas leak in the main chamber of their cellblock.” It took a moment for Shield to realize that the new voice was coming from Shimmer Shape. It sounded nothing like her! “I am escorting them to an alternate holding facility until the matter can be fixed.”
“Hmm…” For a moment Guardian Shield thought this High Commander Blackfang had seen through the ruse, and it took every ounce of his willpower to keep from tensing up. “Very well then… I shall send a maintenance team to patch things up. Carry on.” More astounding than the fact that the lie had worked was that not one pony let lose a sigh of relief. There was a buzzing of wings, and Shield glanced up in time to see a monster of a changeling, easily as big as the burliest of workhorses, wearing a set of ornately carved armor forged out of some sort of black metal. The helmet extended down to cover his upper fangs, giving them a jagged edge that almost seemed to glow in the dim light of the cavern. He let loose and involuntary shudder, hoping he would never face that changeling in battle, and safe in the assumption that he was not the only pony thinking that.
The rest of the escape was relatively uneventful. No changeling they encountered came quite as close to suspecting them as High Commander Blackfang had, and the changeling guarding the entrance to the caverns didn’t even stop them! By the time an alarm was raised they were already in the city proper and managed to somehow evade detection.
After just over an hour of moving through the cratered streets and ransacked houses of the changeling-held upper city, they were met by a patrol of night guards in the marketplace. Though these guards were obviously expecting the group, they still insisted on performing an illusion disspellment on every single one of them, and Nightshield proceeded to return the favor. So that’s Shimmer’s natural color, Shield thought as the unicorn in question accepted the disspellment and failed to change colors.
When everypony was satisfied that nopony was a changeling, the newly freed army was led not to the palace, which was currently occupied by Queen Chrysalis herself, but to the lower-class districts towards the base of the mountain. It was there that they met up with Princess Luna, who’s mane now looked more like a beautiful sunset than a dark star field, and were brought up to date on the situation.
Within minutes of the changelings’ first attack, when in had become apparent that local forces wouldn’t be enough to claim victory, a message had been sent to the military command center in Stalliongrad for an immediate mobilization towards Canterlot. Those forces would be arriving tomorrow evening, and were sufficient in number and training to deal with the changeling swarm. Unfortunately, such a massive force couldn’t have gone unnoticed by the changelings themselves, and they were expected to launch a full assault in the morning, probably in hopes of capturing the sole remaining Princess of Equestria and forcing the ponies to stand down. The escape that night had been instigated because the remaining guardsponies, roughly half of the forces that had been present at the start of the battle, were insufficient to hold out against the expected attack.
The rest of the night was spent fitting armor and preparing for the battle that would decide the fate of Equestria.

Authors Notes: This chapter was mostly written between the hours 12:00 and 4:00 A.M. across fiveish days, so quality may be a bit spotty.
I couldn’t imagine what the changelings would be doing attacking Canterlot like that if they didn’t plan on sticking everypony in a Lotus Eater Machine where they still produce love, and apparently someone in the changeling chain of command has a bit of OCD (perhaps it’s Blackfang?) and insisted that all of the guardsponies be held together. All of the foals are also in the same place, and the other ponies are sorted by age, profession, and hair color.
Next time we’ll get to the meet up everypony’s been waiting for! How will Celestia react to the state of her home? How will the native Equestrians react to the UNSC ponies? What other eyes may be watching from the shadows (besides yours, I mean)? Truths will come out, trusts will be tested, and blood will spill, next time on My Little Halo!
As always, feedback is more than just noise; it’s how I improve, so give me some, and I’ll give you an even better chapter next time!
Post-revision notes: I can’t even recall what I changed in this chapter…