No guards. No reinforcements.
Just the way she liked it.
Luna stretched her wings wide as she soared through the frigid air of the frozen north towards the site Colonel Sunder had reported. Under royal orders, she’d forced her own bodyguards to remain in the Crystal Palace. They'd bristled and protested of course, but in the end they'd had no choice but to obey their sovereign.
It was a mercy, as Luna saw it.
The Night Guard of this lesser era was nothing compared to the hale masters of war she had marched into battle with against Sombra and, later on, her own sister. The organization was a brittle shadow of its old glory, a relic kept around by Celestia out of sentiment, rather than any true need or purpose.
Heartfelt and Gloam, for all of their high marks and good training, were born in an era of peace.
This shrouded thing in the north was a product of a different age. It, like herself, was an entity forged for the purpose of war and war alone.
Ah, so that’s it.
Luna smiled wanly against the whipping winds as the realisation touched her mind.
That was why she was so eager to face this thing down alone. Not because calling reinforcements would endanger other ponies who were unsuited to battle something like this, even though that was true. And it wasn’t even to protect the Crystal Empire, although it was true she was doing that as well.
No, Luna wanted to fight it because she was tired.
She was tired of pretending to be the demure Princess of the Moon. Tired of pretending to be content with this soft, spineless age.
Luna was tired of peace.
One more thing she could never confide to her sister.
Her wan smile stretched into a grin as she put another surge of strength behind her wings and soared forward. She was not necessarily eager to reach the shadow but took comfort in that when she did it would be glorious.
Luna saw it from almost a full kilometer away.
The entity was little more than an amorphous roil of shadows that meandered aimlessly across the tundra.
Her eyes narrowed as she measured its pace and direction before she glanced down and lit her horn to scan for the mental flickers of equine minds. She found them easily enough.
No matter how well camouflaged they made themselves, it took a true master to hide the presence of a mind. None in this era that Luna had encountered knew the trick, which was unsurprising. Few in her own time could have managed it. Celestia herself was hilariously bad at hiding her presence unless she was using powerful masking magic which was a dead giveaway by itself.
Luna turned a graceful corkscrew in the air, angled down, and dove, slicing through the cold winds to land amidst the hidden rangers in their mottled gray-and-white cloaks.
“Report,” Luna said tersely. “And don’t bother hiding. If that beast hasn’t noticed you then I assure you it’s not because of your stealth, it is for the same reason you might not notice an insect.”
Four rangers rose sheepishly from the snow, and Luna favored them with a wry grin.
“Your discipline speaks well of your training, though,” Luna amended. “Could any distinguishing traits of the beast be discerned?”
The four ponies shared glances before one, an earth pony mare, gave a short nod and stood straighter than the rest.
“Lieutenant Deadeye, ma’am,” she said as she saluted. Luna couldn’t tell her true colors under the oil paints that distorted her coat. “I got the closest to its path and…”
She shuffled around in her baggy cloak for a moment before drawing out a small notebook with a black bookmark tucked into it, and hoofing it over.
Luna raised an eyebrow as she lit her horn and took it, flipping it open to the marked page. On the rough paper, sketched in charcoal, was a simple drawing. It was something like a pawprint, the like of which might have belonged to an enormous canine if one had both an extremely loose idea of what a wolf’s paw was supposed to look like and a willingness to drastically improvise.
The sight of it put a cold stone in Luna’s gut as she slowly closed the notebook and passed it back to Deadeye.
“How long has this thing been wandering out here?” Luna asked quietly, and the sudden shift in her tone and expression sluiced ice down the spines of all four rangers.
After a moment, Deadeye turned to the larger stallion among them.
“Captain Gander, ma’am,” he introduced himself as he stood. “It’s been sighted three times, counting this one, over the past five months. We think it emerged somewhere east of the city and it’s been moving anticlockwise around city borders ever since.”
“But you can’t be certain?” Luna asked.
“No, ma’am,” Gander replied. “We’re not sure how, but we always lose it shortly after each appearance, it’s like it just… ceases existing.”
“I see.”
Luna turned away from the rangers to face the silent tempest that was slowly plodding away from them and narrowed her eyes. This was what she'd wanted, Luna reminded herself. She had wanted a fight like the old days, when life and death were on the line and nothing else mattered but the next moment, the next second, the next breath.
“We shall be teleporting thee and thine back to the Crystal Palace,” Luna started as she began stretching, rolling her neck and withers to the tune of a few satisfying pops and cracks. “With all haste, you must alert Princess Cadence and the Lord Governor Armor to raise all defenses, then send missive begging support from my sister in Canterlot.”
“Princess?” Gander spoke with quiet dread, and whatever other words remained in him died in his throat as Luna fixed with a one-eyed glare over her shoulder.
“Tell Our sister we battle the Sun Dog, she will know the name,” Luna said grimly. “And to satisfy thy curiosity, the daemon shaketh thy pursuit by using the portentous moment between day and night to burrow twixt this realm and the Dreamtime only to emerge at some later dawn, but which dawn We cannot say, so We must challenge it here. The longer We permit it to wander and glut itself on solar magic, the more impossible it will be to slay.”
“Can’t we simply leave it alone?” One of the other rangers offered meekly. “It doesn’t seem aggressive.”
Luna turned her glare on him and he wilted back.
“Nay,” Luna replied quietly. “It circles thy city because it has chosen Crysopolis as its next feasting ground, but likely it has been starving for centuries, so it feeds first on the light of the sun. Had We but known when the Sun Dog first emerged We could have slain it with ease, but now… now We are not so sanguine of that outcome.”
“Ma’am… your Highness, please,” Gander said grimly. “We can’t allow you to engage that thing if it’s as dangerous as you say! We can muster forces and—”
“By the time any significant force is raised it shall be well past sunset, and the beast will have gone and be stronger for it!” Luna cut through his protest with another glare. “Thou shalt do as We have bidden, Captain, and We shall endure long enough in battle to keep it from retreating to digest its latest meal.”
“Forgive me, your Highness, but… how long?” Gander asked. “How long can you last?”
Luna did not look him in the eye. She did not turn nor did she spare a glance over her shoulder. Her dark eyes were fixed on the moving titan of shadow as she answered the ranger Captain.
“Long enough.”
Her words struck a chord in the rangers. Slowly, but as one, each of the four raised and beat their hooves across their chests in salute. It was an old style of salute, to clash one's hoof to one's breast, and one that had been forgotten in this new and peaceful age.
Luna turned at the sound and favored the four with a weary smile.
“Be swift, my little ponies,” Luna said softly. “May the north wind be mild, and the sun mellow.”
“And may thy loved ones meet thee at thy summer’s end.” Gander spoke the old words, and they stirred a spark in Luna’s chest.
A warrior’s farewell.
It was, she thought, a good thing that not all the luster of the old days had faded, and hearing those words here and now.
Yes… it was good.
“Fare thee well, wherever you fare, Rangers,” Luna said with a small nod.
Then she lit her horn, ignited her magic, and with a callous snap of displaced air the rangers were gone, back to the Crystal Palace to raise the alarm.
“Enough dilly-dally, old mare,” Luna muttered as she turned to the shadow. “Thou still hast monsters to slay.”
Breathing deep, Luna lit her horn once more and brushed the edges of the Wall of Sleep. There were pockets and alcoves dug into that grand old barrier, and in one such sidelong dimension Luna had tucked away her most precious possessions.
With a cobalt flare, she drew out her barding, piece by piece, cladding her in the colors of a moonless night. She had shed this armor in her days as Nightmare Moon. At the time she had told herself it was because the armor represented an era that no longer existed and because she refused to wear the old colors.
Only later did Luna admit to herself that she refused to wear the armor out of shame.
Not now, though.
Now, she could wear her old armor again with pride, even if it might very well be for the final time.
The wind howled around her as peytral, pauldrons, and gorget locked into place, settling heavily over Luna’s body. It was good to be clad for war again, even if she was alone this time.
Once, in past times, she would have been surrounded by her armies, and in the times before that, before the Unification and before the Elements, she would have been surrounded by her sisters.
They, like all the others of that age, were gone now.
Not even dust.
“Time is cruel, sisters,” Luna muttered as she raised her chamfron and stared through the helm’s slit. “Cruel enough that We should be the only one left of us. Cruel enough that even the face of Equus has forgotten thy names.”
Turning the helm over, she raised it, then lowered it, slotting her horn through the brace, and letting her starlit mane flow through the comb to billow out behind her like a pennant.
“We do not forget, though,” Luna said softly as she raised her head to face the slowly drifting shadow.
“For We are the last.”
Luna spread her wings, the delicate bones of which were braced in rare armor shaped in the stormforges of old Pegasopolis.
“And We are the brightest.”
Baring her teeth in a snarl, Luna tore into the sky, lighting her horn once more to draw her weapons from the space beyond the Wall of Sleep. Six dark blades, guardless and double-edged, each one bearing a mare’s name in ancient Unicornian etched along the flat of the half-meter blade.
Luna spoke each of the names in turn as she wheeled in the sky, turning in flight to bear down on the ponderous shadow.
“Penumbra. Orpheia. Mallea.” Each name brought memories. Memories, and tears. “ Tenebra. Lumina…”
She trailed off at the final blade. Her blade. She did not speak that name with the others. No one ever would. Her name would join the names of her sisters only in death.
Such was the burden of the final sister.
Igniting her horn, Luna pulled lambent moonlight from the sun-dark sky and spit it down in a ravening hammer of ghostly light. For all its ephemeral glow, the beam struck the umbral shroud like a spear, splitting through the barrier with a clap of thunder.
The instant the shroud fell, a dim and noisome light spilled out. Light like cancer. Light like mold. The illumination crawled through the air like a dead thing desperate for the warmth of life as the enormous canid shape deep within that all-devouring light turned from its mindless plodding advance to look up into the sky at the alicorn who had challenged it.
The Sun Dog, for its innocuous name, was a threat that Luna knew all too well. It was a thing to whom death was a stranger. More shadow and dark magic than flesh and whatever else the mad tyrant had cobbled together to shape its body than anything real. It was stood better than 8 meters high at the best approximation of its shoulder, its teeth were dripping beads of headache-colored light, and to this day Luna still wasn’t certain there was even enough real life left in the thing to properly die.
Thrice, Luna and Celestia had slain it, and each time it had returned as deadly and terrible as ever.
She had dared to hope that, without the ancient sorcery of King Sombra fueling it, the damned thing might finally waste away.
“Ought to have known better,” Luna muttered grimly as her six blades circled her.
Spells spilled from Luna’s horn, layering one over the other, sinking into bone, muscle, skin, and steel.
Bones that were already stronger than any living pony became as strong as concrete as the Fortitude of Adamance sunk into them. Bellwether’s Bracing Strength made corded steel out of Luna’s muscles. Flesh that healed in hours what took other ponies days to mend became like self-knitting cloth with the infusion of Threnody’s Convalescence.
Baring her blades like the fangs of a hunting cat, Luna beat her wings and hammered through the air at the thing.
Far in the distance, beyond the sight range of the rangers and the moon goddess alike, a stranger watched. He watched from a risen crest of snow and ice as the moon descended to the earth to beat back a shadow made of poisoned sunlight, and despite the ache in his leg and bitterness in his heart… something stirred.
“Foolish,” the stranger muttered, his voice a grating, leonine rumble as he began limping forward. “But who is the greater fool, I wonder?”