Ground zero. Canterlot High. A blackened crater, nothing left but rubble and debris. A great hole in the ash clawed out by some terrible cosmic hand. Nothing lived in that place. It was quiet, quiet enough to hear one's own heartbeat, Sugarcoat noticed.
But her heart did not beat. Nor did her lungs draw breath – she dust, like the rest of the dreamscape. In the distance, a sun began to set. It wasn’t the Earth's star though – this sunset was hued a sickly green, a strangled blue and an unhealthy pink. It moved slowly, swaying languidly against the grey sky, like a complementary dot of paint being lazily smeared across a monotone canvas.
In the twilight haze it offered, the only light in Sugarcoat's dreamed up world, she saw a statue – crumbled and defaced, but still rising proudly above the desert. It was a horseman, and his steed reared proudly even in the apocalypse. Like a skyscraper dreamed from marble the structure towered over the dust, the sediment beneath it still miraculously preserved.
Then the sun set – and everything went black. With the loss of sight, came sound. Evil cheers, hooting and hollering, screaming and shouting, all in profane praise to some horrid king. Shapes moved and twisted around Sugarcoat, jagged and edged and dancing with locked hands around the foot of the statue's spire. It was a ritual, and the inhuman clarity of the bizarre cries combined with the occasional fiery touch of the knife-like figures sickened Sugarcoat.
As the things danced, still shadowed and chanting their alienages, new lights resurfaced. Three of them, resembling spotlights, flickered into being around the statue. One revealed a knight, with his blackened plate mail glinting in the moonlight. The man himself faced the sculpture, and he wore an ermine cape that flowed in some unfelt wind – its impossible proportions letting it twist and entangle the pitch-black dancing fiends below. The cloth gave the girl brief glimpses of their features – the demons waltzed on needlepoint tiptoes, their hands ended equally, with dagger-like claws stabbed into their neighbours wrists. The horrors had no proper mouths, rather their heads were split lengthways – leaving two hornlike, from between which their song emanated.
The knight above waved his hands in some obscene parody of a conductor's orders, and the monsters below followed. Wrenching free their claws, taking sometimes chunks of their comrades flesh with them – drawing gouts of steaming tarlike blood – they screamed in unison. The noise was nightmarish; a collection of shattering glasses and crashing cars and weeping women. It continued as the things skittered toward Sugarcoat, now corporeal and terrified.
She ran, tripping and stumbling in the darkness, fleeing desperately up the crater – its gigantic size rendering it steep, yet hopefully surmountable. Screeching the horror followed, clawing and nipping with burning horns and fingernails. Sugarcoat shrugged them off, whipping one with the butt of her shotgun – it tumbled silently into the heavy mass of sharpness below. Another one was stabbed, and the knife faded harmlessly into its matte-dark flesh.
The pursuit continued, boiling hot in the night, dead yet still hungry with the whoops of the nightmare fiends. Sugarcoat hurt – everywhere – as the things landed slice after slice into her. She fought back as much as she could, her arsenal of weapons quickly disappearing into the incorrigible demonic horde. Soon she was left with only her spear, jabbing and staggering up the endless hill.
It was now too steep to climb. Back against the crumbling wall of ash, Sugarcoat battled the army of evil. The spear, stolen from a raider in what felt like another lifetime, she managed to hold them at bay for hours – slashing and hooking and battering back the beasts with the broken haft of polearm. The knight turned to her. Though miles away, Sugarcoat saw his face with perfect clarity. It was the grey of the rotting dead; doughy and with a sick pallor; and it was bent into an arrogant grimace. The man flew down to her, eyes trailing a purplish smoke that faded into the ever-present smog. The demons parted as he approached, bowing down in reverence as their king passed through.
He sneered, arms spread apart in a mocking boast of an offered hug. Neck twisted to breaking with a wrenching snap, his head swivelled back to the statue. There, the second light flickered, giving light to cowled and crooked figure – bent and bowed by old age, it hung in the air, balancing its ghostly thin body on a cane seemingly carved from bone. Then the knight's head twisted the rest of the way round, contorting and narrowing as it moved. The formerly lush and glossy black hair matted into a stringy lime green, while the face grew pink and gaunt. Once back round, it was indistinguishable from Lemon's face when Sugarcoat had first rescued her.
Save for its eyes. Those burned with a horrid eagerness, and they waved and rolled madly in her desiccated skull. Three times they danced; once, and they flashed each colour of the rainbow. Again, and the world shattered to the cries of the screaming fiends. Once more, and the dark silence returned, rushing around Sugarcoat, whirling quiet and disorientating blindness. As it did, Lemon's smile grew even wider – a white crescent against the night, expanding until the eyes themselves – still stuck in their glimmering glare of depraved hunger – were skewered upon it. Pierced by fangs, they popped – splattering the stunned girl with gore.