Vivid followed Luna out of her private chambers, walking maybe a little too quickly as she tried to move past the guards, despite those guards knowing at a glance that Vivid had taken a shower. There was only one reason really to have showered in the princess’s private chambers, and that was because they had been intimate.
Despite all of the approval and protection that Luna and her guards offered, Vivid was still nervous.
It felt as though it was all a dream and one of them was going to soon tell the public, drag her through the street as sullying their great princess. But that never came. She just kept waiting for something to go wrong.
And every time they had an argument, or they were away, she felt that big finality creeping in towards her, but Luna would snatch it away before it could overwhelm her.
Now she was following Luna through the halls like a puppy dog, trying not to smile. She sped up to walk alongside Luna, so she would feel a little less silly.
“Good Dusk, Princess,” Vivid said happily.
Luna laughed, shaking her head a little. “It was a good evening, and now Dusk and Rising shall contain a great deal of work. Not necessarily so good.”
“Oh but we do good work,” Vivid countered. “I am looking forward to seeing Sheen appointed head of the Archway Mages. Though I wish that Wishing Star hadn’t felt the need to step down…”
“She is still determined to find Clover,” Luna said as she shook her head sadly. “One cannot lead a mage’s guild if they are preoccupied at all times.”
Vivid bit her lip before looking to Luna. She wanted to offer some help but didn’t feel she could actually do anything. But there was some social requirement to helping an old friend.
“Maybe I could lend my skill in tracing magical signatures?” she said nervously.
Luna just shook her head. “I don’t need you falling into that obsession as well,” Luna said as they entered the great hall.
All the guards saluted, until Luna nodded and they relaxed. Vivid noticed that a few of the guards were slow to salute. More new guards, she supposed. She would have to ask the Castilian to improve the training, if these new guards were out of order.
Luna sat on her throne, and Vivid sat off to the side as they waited for the Dusk court to begin. But it seemed to be taking longer than normal. The guards shifted, looking towards the door, wondering where the Seneschal was to announce the court session.
“Where is… His name, it must have been Quick something, Quick Step?” Luna pondered.
“The Seneschal?” Vivid clarified, getting a nod from Luna. “Well, he must be late,” she concluded as she stood and began walking towards one of the hidden passages where the maids and attendants would typically hide, only to notice there were none there.
After a moment of staring at the empty doorway for a moment, frowning, Vivid turned back to Luna. “When is the last time that you saw one of the servants?” she asked nervously.
Luna blinked, taken aback. “This evening when I woke and they helped me dress,” she concluded. “Are there really none around?”
“Nor have I seen Quick Trot, the Castilian, or anyone else but the guards,” Vivid said as she turned and saw only guards.
Then, the great doors at the head of the hall slowly was pulled open, enough for a single pony to enter. It was the Castilian, the caretaker of the entire castle and all the individuals within it.
A short unicorn with a white coat and a green mane, she was wearing a pair of glasses and, oddly enough, one of Luna’s crowns.
She pushed the door closed and slowly walked towards the throne, while Luna watched her with narrowed eyes.
“Are you not going to speak your outrage?” the mare asked in an amused tone. “Decry my very appearance, demand your guards seize me?”
Luna looked around the room, and noted that only a quarter of the guards seemed disturbed, their weapons at the ready. The rest were smiling, or watching Princess Luna, or staring off blankly as though nothing was happening at all. Something was terribly wrong.
Meanwhile, Vivid could sense something that Luna could not. The mare walking into the hall was unlike anything she’d seen before. It was as though the images of a dozen different ponies were overlapping, shifting endlessly, and the largest one had the clear outline of an alicorn, though bent and twisted, with tattered wings. She stepped back in horror.
“Princess…”
Luna didn’t look to Vivid, still intent on watching the figure.
“Luna…”
“Yes, please listen to your court mage,” the mare chuckled. “I am so very curious what she sees in me. What she urgently must warn you of.”
Luna seemed shaken out of her tension, and looked briefly to Vivid, giving her permission to speak.
“She’s not what she seems,” Vivid insisted quickly. “She looks… She’s like an alicorn but…”
“But I actually look like a monster?” the mare said before laughing, low and dark.
She stopped and an unearthly green flame began to swirl around her hooves. It seemed to burn away her flesh, leaving a blackened and emaciated set of limbs behind as the flame climbed higher. Gradually revealing a creature that made Luna and Vivid both recoil.
Her body was black and glossy, segmented like an insect. Her wings were like a dragonfly’s, clear and iridescent. Fangs hung from her upper jaw, sharp and predatory, and flanking a cruel smile.
“You don’t recognize me,” she stated simply, her slitted green eyes taking in the disgusted alicorn.
All around the room, the oddly acting guards were stripping the rest of the guards of their weapons, as they revealed themselves as smaller versions of the creature standing in the middle of the hall.
“Should I?” Luna asked coldly. “I do not spend much time in the presence of insane tricksters.”
The response was a wild, frantic laugh. So overblown and dramatic that it just made Vivid and Luna more nervous.
“Insane trickster! Insane Trickster!!! Such a wonderful description but no!”
Again, she was surrounded in green flame before Clover stood in the middle of the hall. Vivid recoiled in shock, that the mare suddenly looked so simple. All her warped form and twisted magic hidden instantly.
“Your highness,” Clover said with a bow to Luna and a smirk. “Or is this not enough? No, I knew you long before this.”
Again, she was surrounded in green flame, and appeared as a unicorn mare that Vivid didn’t recognize.
A grey-mauve coat, goldenrod eyes, and a maroon mane with hints of pink shot through it, pulled back in a braid. Her mark was of two flowers above an unrolled scroll on which a pair of lightning bolts are held in an X by a horseshoe around their crossing. She wore glasses, and smiled softly as Luna’s hoof began to shake, eyes wide and expression of terror.
“Who is that?” Vivid asked, not recognizing the unicorn at all.
“A lover from long ago,” Luna said as she lit her horn, only for it to shimmer and fade.
She listed to the side, gasping for breath suddenly. The imitation creature laughed with a cruel tone as she stepped closer.
“Oh dear sweet Luna, you didn’t notice? Your Torc is a little heavier today?”
Looking quite panicked, Luna lifted the torc over her head with her hooves before tossing it away, to slam into the floor between her and the imposter. It shattered, pieces of the thick necklace-like torc flying away and leaving a necklace that had been hidden within laying among the pieces.
Just by looking at it, Vivid could tell that it was made of Alicornium, the horrible metal she’d found. But it was humming with energy, instead of pulling it in. It had drained Luna.
The imposter put the necklace on and her eyes flashed ruby red, before she resumed her insectoid natural form.
“You may call me Chrysalis,” she hissed. “But just once, before you die.”
“Chrysalis, I…” Luna began.
Her horn lit and a red beam of light punched a hole through the throne, the wall behind, and another wall beyond that. Luna was carried by it and by the time she tumbled to a stop among the wreckage, she was half the size with pastel blue hair, and unconscious. Drained almost completely of magic.
But in that moment, Vivid could perceive something more than just the horrible corrosive red color that was being seared into her magical vision. She could see the flow of magic throughout the room.
Luna had not been thrown through the walls by the force of a spell. She had been tossed away by the sheer thrust of her magic leaving her own body, being ripped out like a stream of water flowing back into the monster that had attacked her, and empowering her even further. Red smoke made of excess energy flowed from Chrysalis’s eyes as she grinned and turned her head to face Vivid.
She could not defeat that.
With a gallop of desperate energy, Vivid dove through the nearest doorway and slid to a stop before she would hit a wall. The doorframe behind her was hit by that horrible magic, and she watched in horror as the stone itself was drained of so much energy that it began to crumble to dust.
With a whimper, Vivid turned and ducked through two more doors, only to come face to face with a black-chitin coated creature in guard’s armor which had just finished tying up several other guards.
With a quick application of a sleeping spell, she stepped past the creature and undid the ropes.
“Run,” she said urgently. “Evacuate if you can, but we can’t fight this. I’ll stay to delay her.”
The color drained from their faces, and they nodded somberly in recognition of her sacrifice before leaving.
With the guards fleeing, Vivid turned back towards the great hall and stretched her magical vision as far as it could go. She found that Chrysalis was still in the great hall, standing over Luna. It seemed like they were talking, but she couldn’t tell what they were saying.
She had to find a way to combat that necklace. It was like fighting an alicorn, but worse since it would rip through any magic she tried to use. She had to be clever, now. It was Luna’s only chance.
Chrysalis had been Clover, she realized, and Vivid knew Clover fairly well. She was a competent and creative mage but she rarely was thorough or complex enough. There were usually holes in her designs, or energy wasted due to trying to do things the way she wanted, rather than the most efficient way.
Vivid perked up as she remembered the vapor coming off Chrysalis’s eyes, a clear indicator of wasted energy. Somehow, something was cycling much of the energy being gathered by the amulet through Chrysalis’s head or body and it was leaking from her through her eyes. A common indicator that energy was outflowing from the brain.
She was storing all of the energy in her brain and horn, so that the amulet itself couldn’t be easily removed or targeted, Vivid realized. As long as the energy was in Chrysalis, Vivid wouldn’t be able to sever the two, or prevent her from getting that energy from the amulet.
But Chysalis herself was still vulnerable, and Clover had never been a good fighter. Magic, sure, but she skipped every combat training that was made available to them. Vivid would have to apply a mix of skilled efficient magic that was less vulnerable to the amulet’s draining power, and physical attacks.
She quickly ducked back into the guard’s room and found spears. Six of them were the most she could grab individually in her magic, and she took them before walking slowly and quietly back towards the great hall.
“I loved you, Luna,” were not the words she expected to hear as she approached the great hall, but nonetheless Chrysalis seemed to be saying them. “For six hundred and fifty eight years I have loved you, I tried to show you. I tried to become the one you loved, to bring her back to you, but you wouldn’t let me. You wouldn’t even hear me out.”
Vivid reached the crumbling doorway and floated the spears out into the hall, forming a semicircle around Chrysalis and Luna, floating slightly above.
“I never even met you!” Luna replied, her voice young but filled with pain.
Clearly, Vivid thought, this form with her drained of energy affected more than just her size. She sounded positively childlike.
“You showed up in my castle,” Luna continued. “After the death of a lover, and took her appearance! It’s as near to blasphemy as I’ve ever seen! You never gave me a chance to love you!”
“You already loved her! You already loved Prim Rose, and I could have BEEN her! Forever!”
Again, she transformed into that unicorn, as Vivid tried to steady her breathing. She was about to kill somepony. She was about to end a life, and for the first time it would be purposeful, deliberate, and final.
She formed a magical explosion behind each of the spears, and set them off in unison, creating a rapid popping.
Chrysalis had enough time to turn to face the sound, before the spears impaled her.
Two went through her body, and the other four impaled her legs. Her scream was shrill and high, as she lost focus on her current form.
Green fire surrounded her, and as she became her blackened monstrous self once again, the spears tore and warped inside of her.
Coughing up green bile, she twitched in an attempt to dislodge one of the spears, but only stumbled to fall to the ground. Her horn lit in bright red to try and pull one of them loose, but the spear part she grabbed just turned to ash each time, being drained of its essence at a faster and faster rate.
She screamed with frustration as Luna and Vivid watched in horror.
“You won’t be able to get them out without creating a feedback loop and killing yourself,” Vivid said from the doorway before jumping aside to avoid an attack. “You have to take it off! You can still survive!”
Another shuddering scream made Vivid cringe, but after a moment there was the ringing sound of something metal hitting the ground.
Vivid jumped back out and created a dome of magic around the amulet on the floor, making it impossible for Chrysalis to get it again.
But she seemed more interested in pulling the spears from her body. She was not a pony any longer, not by even the most distant definitions. The liquid that oozed from her wounds was nothing like blood, and she seemed not to be suffering from the ill effects of organ damage. She was unnatural, but she was alive.
Chest heaving with breath, Chrysalis looked to the dome and then looked to Vivid, and Vivid could see her chain of thought. Killing Vivid would quite neatly get rid of the dome around the amulet, and satisfy her need for vengeance.
As Chrysalis lunged towards Vivid, Vivid was already charging her horn with magic. She was focusing on the dome protecting the amulet, and normally that would make it nearly impossible to cast another spell, but Vivid was a Mage of the Archway, and did not see or think like most unicorns.
Where other unicorns saw a protective dome around an amulet, Vivid saw a pre-made spell circle and channel of energy between the dome and herself.
So, on the spot with no preparation, she made a tunnel, just like Luna's spell that transported her. But instead of providing a location, she connected it directly to the dome.
It nearly tore her apart as she was ripped from the stone floor by her own magic in a blinding flash of light, and then reappeared inside the dome, laying on the amulet, with Chrysalis staring in shock from the doorway Vivid had been in moments before.
As Chrysalis screamed in rage, Vivid did the only thing she could. She put the amulet on.