Hearth’s Warming Eve, and Manehattan is burning.
This is the second rebellion to befall the city since the enthronement of Nightmare Moon.
Before the first – the Twilight Insurrection – the lights of the city had outshone the stars in the night sky.
In the winter months, amid a famine and the bitter cold (for temperatures have dropped since the beginning of the Eternal Night), the simmering discontent of the ponies is brought to a boil, and uprisings erupt across the Lunar Domain.
Spontaneous, disorganized, and without ideology, these peasants’ revolts are nipped in the bud by the Night Guard, who descend upon rebel villages from the airborne fortress of Cloudsdale. The cloud city’s perpetual circumnavigation of Equestria has been hastened tenfold, and it leaves behind a wake of ravaged countryside and burning settlements.
When the enemy patrols both the dreamscape and the waking world, it is dangerous to act on dreams of liberation.
The ponies of Manehattan, the City that Never Sleeps, were among the first to declare for Nightmare Moon in the bloodletting which had followed her accession.
The irony of this is not lost on the pony named Breve Wit, who makes a quip to that effect. His fellow comrades laugh, stirred from their torpor by his cleverness, or appreciative of his cheer.
They know that their uprising is in its death throes; pamphlets dropped by the Night Guard depict a necropolis encircled by Lunar forces. The past few weeks have seen the stream of refugees fleeing the countryside dwindle, cease, and resume in the other direction, as the noose tightens around the city.
Revolutionary Manehattan, the sole success of the Dawn Rising, will soon become the scene of its greatest butchery.
Yet the revolutionaries are anything but distraught. More than that, they are full of camaraderie, plucky valor and stoic stoutheartedness in equal measure, for they know that their cause is right and just, and that when day breaks at long last history will remember them, they who carried the torch of hope when the night was darkest, as noble champions of freedom and liberty!
Breve Wit is the commander of the Manehattanite rearguard, having been elected to the position by his fellows, as is the convention for the rebels’ officers. In Bronclyn, the last borough remaining in rebel hooves, he has been tasked with holding back the Lunar advance while the city’s young are evacuated.
It was only yesterday that he had visited the docks where the evacuations were taking place. He had quietly marveled at the sobriety of the parents and the resoluteness of the foals, the dignified restraint of their grief, their firm resolve, the unspoken promise, between father and colt, mother and filly, that the spirit of Equestria, the most cherished values and deepest beliefs of ponykind, would live on in this generation of foals, the last to have grown up under Celestia’s sun – for be it in Equestria, Griffonia, or Zebrica, friendship and harmony will endure wherever there are ponies to live them!
It is in remembrance of this that his heart swells with patriotic feelings, his faith in equinity unwavering and indomitable, as he surveys his soldiers, several dozens of them in all, the last of the rebellion’s fighters. They are so covered in dust and grime as to be nearly indistinguishable from the soot-stained rubble around them, and their bodies bear the scars of their struggle – injuries that range from the trifling to the imminently fatal, the gauntness of emaciation, the pallor of disease – but so are they marked by the virtue of their suffering, the righteousness of their vocation manifesting in the look of utmost serenity worn by every pony on the barricade.
Such bravery! Such beauty!
For a moment it is too much, and the surge of pride and affection he feels overwhelms him, threatening to burst out of his chest.
We few, we happy few! Getting to his hooves, he hollers to his soldiers a wordless cry, one of the boundless kinship and comradery he feels for them, and is suddenly illuminated by a flare which he knows heralds the Lunar onslaught – but in that moment the glare is to him as a spotlight is to an actor, or the rapturous glow of daybreak.
He sees himself as if from afar, rearing up atop the barricade, light glinting off the serrated blades on his outstretched wings, surrounded by his loyal ponies – a heroic last stand, prepared to go out in a blaze of glory, and down in history. He feels like he’s on top of the world.