The doors of the manor-turned-orphanage-turned-derelict had to be forced shut against the snow. The lock was an old ironwood beam propped against the side of the door, which suited Luna's sense of aesthetics and was therefore, according to her better judgement, probably a bit excessive. Nevertheless, she slotted the wooden drawbar across the door with the booming thud of an entrance thoroughly secured. Architects of the time believed in home defense, especially out here. After all, in the forest's opinion, this place still belonged to the forest.
Princess Luna, retired, surveyed the foyer and its walls of cedar panel once richly lacquered, now cracked and pale. In the common room beyond it the high windows, with their lintels well above the tip of Celestia's horn, had all been boarded up. A draft stirred the white sheets over the furniture.
Princess Celestia, retired, set their bags down and yawned. "Well, I expected much worse. It does have a ceiling. And I think some of the draft is coming from the hearth, so the chimney may not be clogged. You handle the dust sheets and I'll see what I can do about a fire. And then how about a nap? You got up very early this evening, and I suspect I won't be sleeping much tonight."
"Wise." Luna lifted a sheet from a long couch and began to fold it without shaking out the dust. "As for a fire, it would improve the mood of this place, though I suspect it will do nothing for the cold."
"I don't believe summer does anything for it," said Celestia. She conjured a pile of dry firewood. "But you like the cold, of course."
"I suppose I do—the wholesome cold. The cold of ice water, the cold of the moon's other side. Not this sort. I suppose you don't feel it in the first place?" Luna righted a skewed endtable.
Celestia smiled. "No. I feel the sun." The logs burst into crackling flame. "Shall I pull the boards from the windows, or do you think that's pushing it?"
"I see no way to do this without being audacious." Luna's horn shone. Nails throughout the building popped out of place and the boards fell. Overcast gray light filled the room. The nails gathered together in Luna's field and fell into a drawer, which she shut. "In for a bit, in for a crown."
Celestia watched the fire gutter and puff out. She lit the wood again. Again, it burnt merrily for a few seconds and then died. The logs were perfectly dry and the spells were right, but the fire wouldn't keep. She dispensed with the magic and tried a match with the same result.
Luna sat down beside Celestia. "Does it not feel to you as if the flame goes somewhere else?"
Celestia frowned in thought. "To me it simply disappears. What else do you see?"
Luna struck one of Celestia's matches and watched the fire falter. This time there wasn't even any smoke. "Only that the fire is taken elsewhere."
"Where?"
"Nowhere with a name. A memory, I think, without a mind to hold it. An insatiability." Luna passed the matchbox back. "It might be our goal, but for now I think it's best not to interact with it."
"No more fire, then." Celestia put the matches away. She cast a light spell, a yellow globe that hung in the air above their heads. It held.
***
However much she tried, Celestia couldn't be everywhere at once. Things happened. In the forests, on the frontiers, in the quiet corners and edges of Equestria, there were tragedies. Sometimes nut and berry gatherers would find the bones of the unfortunate in out-of-the-way places. Buildings would burn down and not everyone would get out before it collapsed. Rangers would find silent houses in the woods, break down the door or fly through a window, and find that they were years too late to do anything but dig the graves. It was not okay, and Celestia never allowed herself to get used to stories of distant tragedies. But these things happened. They’d happened here.
Luna opened the basement door and looked down past the collapsed wooden stairs. The air tasted of minerals and dust, and water stains lined the walls. She flew to the bottom of the stairs and walked to the great black boiler, which had been state of the art 200 years ago but had been a relic by the time the children moved in. It was twice Luna's height. Hauling it to this remote location might have taken weeks, considering the condition of the roads, and how long to carry the pipes and radiators necessary to take the heat to every room in the manor? But it hardly mattered; if the fireplace refused to light, the boiler would as well.
Across from the boiler, several blankets had been folded respectfully. The remains had already been taken away. Luna refused to look at the blankets too closely, as there was no need to dwell on it—in fact, perhaps it would be better to remove them in case Celestia happened to come down. Luna picked up the blankets and stashed them in the firewood rack.
***
Celestia opened the master bedroom blinds to let the sunset in. The amber light of an approaching sunset illuminated a spartan room. There were no photographs, no paintings, just a cotton-stuffed mattress atop a bedframe without posts or headboard. It sat next to an armoire which, it turned out, was full of sweaters, hats, and a set of flannel pajamas. He'd lived simply.
"Can you hear me?" Celestia asked the empty room. A breeze from the window stirred the stray edge of a sheet corner hanging from the foot of the bed. The room was silent.
She raised her voice. "Do you recognize me? Show yourself, in whatever form you like."
There was no answer.
Celestia sighed. "All right. We have all the time in the world."
***
Celestia placed globes of soft light throughout the house in preparation for nightfall a few moments from now. Luna watched, half-dozing. She'd woken up quite early in the afternoon, firstly so they could reach the house by sundown, and secondly out of solidarity with her sister, who likely wouldn't be sleeping that night. To lay ghosts to rest, one had to work tired.
The universe lurched.
Luna jerked into full consciousness. "Where is—"
Celestia slammed shut every window in the building. "Do you feel—"
"Cel, where is the sky?"
"It disappeared. Luna, I can't feel the sun. Where are we?"
Luna took a deep breath and sat up. "Let me see." She closed her eyes.
Celestia marshaled herself. "Well, there's our fire, at any rate." Celestia pointed a hoof at the now-burning fireplace. "I take it this is where all our match flames and fire magic went?"
"Yes, I think so." Luna stood up from the couch. "I don't think we can spend the entire night here. Our fire is confusing the rules of this place, else all the lights would go out and we would... no longer be as we are, though I couldn’t say what I mean by that. We have until the fire dies."
So this was a dream in some sense, and now Luna was getting a feel for its structure. "Maybe we should form an exit strategy before anything. Is the main door an exit?" Celestia asked. Best to get the obvious questions out of the way.
"Very much not. If anything, the house is the antechamber to this elsewhere we've stepped into. Do not open that."
"Understood."
They looked down the hall, and up the stairs, and then at each other.
"Should we split up, or stick together?" said Celestia.
Luna stared at her.
Celestia rolled her eyes. "Yes, yes, I know the usual rule. But right now I think the real risk is the fire going out, so maybe you should keep an eye on it."
"Maybe you should, while I search the downstairs. But I take your point; if you decide the fire can look after itself for a little while, you could search the upstairs."
"Upstairs, then."
Luna nodded, cast a spell to hang a globe of pale blue light over her head and walked down the hallway.
Celestia stared into the fire. She'd known the house would harm interlopers; she'd felt its suffering all the way from the other side of the mountain, the sort of wound that would spread to anything in the house that could feel pain. It made her sister and her the best candidates to heal the house, because pain meant something a little different for those who couldn't die.
But she hadn't expected to be unmoored from the sky. A skyless reality was the sort of threat she would have considered notionally impossible, like a square circle, or as if the concept of "up" had disappeared, or the dreams of the dead.
At least Luna would be relatively comfortable. She had experience with quasi-real places operating under strange rules. As for herself, she would just have to make do.
Celestia headed upstairs, lighting candles as she went. Most of them refused to take a flame, but some did, and would for a little while.
***
Luna knocked before she opened the basement door, as there was a difference between being forward and being rude.
"Pardon my intrusion." She produced another globe of light and pushed it into the basement. It didn't do much good, as the dimensions of the room had changed. She could no longer see the ceiling, and the walls were beyond the reach of the light. The broken stairs were gone and there was now nothing but a distant concrete floor. Luna dropped herself off the edge, somewhat gingerly, and landed with a quick flutter to slow her fall.
"Can you hear me, yet? My name is Princess Luna, retired, younger sister of Princess Celestia, retired, who is upstairs. I know you wouldn't recognize me—I'm before your time—but I'm a friend and we've come to help you."
Luna crept forward, keeping an eye out for the boiler. "It's going to end down here, isn't it? I can give you that ending, if you want it. Come out."
On a hunch, Luna stopped and turned in time to see the door moving, drifting away. It was now a distant square of light. She leapt into the air, launched herself at it, strained against a wind pushing her back into the basement... and flew into pale light of the hall. She eased the basement door shut and leaned against it to catch her breath.
"Yes, well, I can come back," Luna muttered.
***
Perhaps they were being a bit cavalier, Celestia reflected, walking through the nursery and looking under each of the ten beds in turn. She just didn't see another option. Huddling by a fire about to go out would be the bigger risk, ultimately. She supposed they could leave every night and come back in the day, perhaps see what all this looked like from outside in the prosaic world. The rangers had told her there was nothing to see. Maybe there would be. Maybe there'd be something useful. Maybe, maybe, maybe. And in the meantime the suffering would continue.
Blankets ruffled on the other end of the room. Celestia lifted her head up from behind the bed to see bedding lift from beds and roll themselves into a pile at the center of the room. Sheets lifted themselves in humps, as if children had stood up underneath them in unison, and drifted toward the pile.
Celestia swallowed, smoothed her face, and cleared her throat. The sheets took no notice. She stepped to the edge of the pile and caught one of the sheets with a hoof. "You're making a mess, little ones."
The mound continued on its path and trotted out from under the sheet to reveal nothing. Every sheet fluttered to the floor and then sank through it. Celestia now stood in a room of bare mattresses.
***
They sat together and watched the fire, now noticeably lower. "They still refuse to interact with me," Celestia grumbled.
"At least we're seeing things now," said Luna. She used the fireplace shovel and poker to maneuver a red coal under a log.
"Yes, there's that. What now? Any ideas?"
Luna was beginning to suspect she was in charge. "We could escape and then come back tomorrow. Did you see any changes in architecture upstairs?"
"No, it's quite the same except all the windows are black."
"The windows aren't the answer."
Celestia nodded. "Anything promising downstairs? Any, I don't know, new doors? Anything locked that wasn't before?"
Luna shrugged. "The basement is bigger. It's possible the boiler door is now large enough to crawl inside, though I never saw the boiler. There is the old trick of drawing a door with chalk on an otherwise blank wall, but that doesn't often work unless it fits the dream narrative." She cast around for answers. "Are there any doors that swing both inward and outward? Sometimes they lead to different places if you open them the other way."
"Nothing upstairs. How about the kitchen?"
"It has no door. No, I recall nothing like that downstairs."
Celestia was just beginning to consider looking under the couch cushions when there was a knock upon the door.
She and Luna looked at each other.
There was another, firmer knock.
"Definitely not," said Celestia.
"Correct." Luna turned back to the fire.
It, whatever it was, hammered on the door so it rattled in its hinges. Celestia mirrored her sister and settled in.
Luna's brow crinkled. "Unless—"
Celestia stared at her sister. "Surely not."
It struck the door like a battering ram.
Luna hesitated. "No, of course not. Yes, it's almost as if it’s trying to interact with us, and yes, we'd certainly learn something, and yes, we might at last have some kind of impact—"
"But that would be silly," said Celestia.
The knocking stopped.
"Last chance," said Luna. "What do you think?"
"I think you were right the first time."
Luna nodded. "I... agree. Perhaps I’m feeling a bit desperate and it’s affecting my judgment. I think the boiler is our best bet, and in the meantime, you can look for ways to stoke this fire."
"Good thought. I wish all the firewood wasn't outside, but..."
Luna lofted a few more light spells into the air to keep Celestia company and finished her sister’s thought. "...But if there were firewood inside, we wouldn't be here in the first place."
***
Luna contemplated the basement door. She wanted this to work. It should have worked in the first place. If she’d stayed when the door began to move, what would have happened?
She could go in and commit to staying, or she could try to open the door the other way, which in this case meant tearing it off its hinges. Perhaps later. She twisted the knob and opened the door.
One wingflap into the room and all her light spells went out. The door disappeared, or at any rate the poor shreds of indirect firelight disappeared from what she could see of the hall. Luna found herself in perfect, silent darkness except for her own wingbeats, which now sounded apart from her. A stray consciousness trickled into her, and as she flew her own skin and fur grew alien. She longed to set them aside, to stop the cacophony of her own pulse and breath, to be done with the trappings of life. This was no place for flesh.
Luna shook off her reverie and told herself to land, if there was still a floor here. But wouldn't it be easier to wander here without hooves or eyes? No, it made no difference, and she might need them later. But wouldn't—
Luna shook it off. "No," she whisper-croaked, and set herself down on a stone floor she couldn't see. "I..." She breathed deep, though the air now tasted like sour milk and medicine, "I want to speak to you." She raised her voice. "Children. Look at me. Look at me."
Something shifted inside her to let her see by darkness rather than by light. She stood among impossible legions of foals who lay tangled together on the stones. A sea of rheumy eyes turned to her.
Luna's voice froze in her throat. She didn't want to be here she didn't want to be here she didn't want to be. The children stared into her and every moment showed her another detail she regretted opening herself to—a shivering hoof, a missing tooth, tears on cheeks that mirrored the tears on her own. Why so many faces? Had she stepped out of the house entirely and found a Sheol of lost foals?
But that was how they saw themselves, wasn't it? This, in their last few hours, had been their world. A vast black cellar, the press of cold bodies around them, each futilely trying to warm the other and themselves in a room with a boiler with no more fuel and a stone floor that drank the warmth from them through the sheets and blankets they lay upon. Each pressed against another, each was surrounded, each member of the pile felt themselves part of their own pile, and each subjective pile dreamed its own dream of dying in the midst of a crowd of dying foals. For years.
"Oh, children, I'm so sorry." Luna sat in their midst and held out her forelegs. "Whatever you do, you can’t kill me, and I want to help you. Come here."
And the crowd moved in.
***
The main door shuddered under axe-blows from the other side as Celestia shuddered under a dust sheet she'd wrapped around herself. The fire was all but out and no amount of broken furniture, drawers, or couch cushions would burn. Nothing would make the fire last, because nothing could fool this other world forever. They were in the mouth of nothingness, and it had only ever been a matter of time before it swallowed.
She heard the axe bite deeply into the door and wrench itself out again.
"Stop that!" Celestia snapped at the door. "I'm thinking!" But the axe fell again.
She could always open the door. It was an irrevocable decision, but perhaps not the wrong one, and in fact there might not be any right decisions left to make. Maybe the mistake had been to stay in the house after dark, and now it hardly mattered what they did. It didn't help that she was hungry in a way she'd never been before, for things she never used to want, because as the fire died and this world asserted itself, the house twisted the living to fit its rules.
The door groaned and the drawbar jumped in place. Something screamed with a voice no living throat could produce.
The scent of her own bones made her mouth water. Her blood had grown thick under her skin. The fire was less a comfort than an obscenity now, counter to the proper order of things, but it would extinguish itself soon enough.
Celestia breathed in. There was no need to give in to the change, however inevitable. There was at least one choice left to make. Open the door, or no? She considered it an upside that her new instincts told her to fear the door as much as her normal better judgment did, as it meant she could choose to open it without fear of being influenced.
And that made all the difference, didn't it? At this moment, she was free to choose.
She set aside the dust sheet and approached the door. For all the blows it had taken, it still held. "All right, all right, I'm up. I'm letting you in."
The pounding stopped.
"Now. Are you a ghost, or a monster from the other side? Let's find out." She threw aside the bar. "And skies help you if you're made of flesh, because I am so very hungry."
The door flew open and the fire went out. Celestia couldn't see the thing on the step, or the trees that had once been outside, or the door. The cold reached into her and stopped her heart and tore the air from her lungs. There was no such thing as light or warmth. Not here.
Welcome home, she mouthed. Come in. We can't make it right but we can make it end.
There was little to the ghost except desperation, but it understood. It slipped into her mind and merged with what was left of her, and together they became something else.
***
They'd had names, once, before the cold. Now they were Luna, the beautiful lady who'd opened her heart to them. They loved her and never wanted to leave her, and hid in her mane and looked out, replaced the points of light with empty eyes, replaced her fur with eyes, lengthened her bones to make room for themselves. They crowded around her legs and played together in her mind. What a beautiful, kind lady who was so afraid but loved them like an older sister! Could she make the boiler work again? They'd stayed together to the end, and past it, and they'd been so good and they hadn't let strangers or monsters get near them, and every night was worse than the night before but now she was here and they loved her. Could big sister help? They loved her.
There were no stairs or door. They climbed the stairs and opened the door. The light was gone, and the foals realized the thing had gotten into the house. That thing at the door and its horrible shrieks...
This is the last night, big sister told them. There’s nothing left in any world you need ever fear.
They found it in the greatroom, huge and pale. The gestalt thing's eyes had healed shut and its overlarge mouth was full of long, thick teeth like a hyena.
"Mr. Foxpaw!" the legion chorused. "We were so scared. There was a monster and the boiler went cold and it hurt, and then it didn't hurt anymore, and now you're back."
Foxpaw leaned down. "A monster at the door, huh," he rumbled. "There was, wasn't there. I... you could say I took care of it."
"It screamed so loud!"
"We were so good. We didn't open the door for anybody."
"It was so cold."
"Why were you gone so long?"
The giant looked down. Mr. Foxpaw, they'd called him. And so he was. "There was an accident in the woods and I couldn't come back. But I had to come back, just had to, because my little wards were waiting. So here I am. I'm so happy to see you."
"You poor man," Celestia whispered to herself from somewhere inside what they’d become.
“Tonight we free them,” said Luna. And in a different voice, "Mr. Foxpaw—"
The giant raised a huge, twisted hoof. "I'm tired, and Mr. Foxpaw is such a long name. Stepping back and looking at the way things are, I think it's time you lot called me 'Paw.' Let's go heat this place up."
And now they were in the basement. The boiler and firewood rack sat together in the center of the room. Foxpaw, already hunched under the low ceiling, bent further to search the floor with his hooves.
The crowd—Luna—watched him. "Paw, what are we?"
"We're home and we're together, that's what we are," said Paw. "Glowbug, would you kindly light the boiler? I can't seem to find it."
"Yes, Paw," said Luna. She tossed the blankets in the boiler furnace and set them alight with magic.
The fire roared out of the hatch. It shattered wood and stone and broke the world, and through the crack, Luna saw starlight.
Thank you.
The dream ended.
***
They woke up together in a burning building. Celestia looked around blearily, frowned, and shook embers out her mane. She explored her teeth with her tongue. Yes, everything was as it should be, so far as she could tell. Luna was examining her own mane and coming to a similar conclusion.
They walked together out into the garden among the graves the rangers dug and watched the house burn under the stars. After a few minutes, Celestia placed a shield around it to contain the conflagration. There was no sense in letting the entire forest go up.
"We did everything we could," said Luna. They had to talk cheek to cheek to hear each other over the flames.
"You more than I," said Celestia.
Luna laughed. "You're just not used to someone else taking the lead." She pulled Celestia into a hug.
For hours they watched the fire. Even the chimney bricks burned to powder. By dawn there was nothing but a hill of white soot in a square pit, eleven gravestones, one sleeping and one waking princess.
Luna rolled over and poked Celestia into consciousness. "Good morning. I'd like to sleep soon, but not here. Do you remember that new inn a mile back?"
Celestia yawned and stretched. "I remember. Yes, let's go back. I'm so hungry I could eat a horse."