//------------------------------//
// Verse 48 
// Story: The Nightmare Knights Become A Band 
// by SwordTune 
//------------------------------//

Returning to the waking world drained Luna. She had not felt so exhausted since the time she confronted her own demons and destroyed the Tantabus. And it did not seem any easier for Daybreaker. The fiery alicorn jostled and wriggled about in her sleeping bag, struggling to wake.
It was still night, and once her eyes had adjusted to the dim light of the campfire, Luna spotted a pair of eyes looking at her intently.
“How’d it go?” Starlight said, reaching out a hoof and helping her stand up. 
“Rough. We only have a few sparse guesses on where the villains may be. But I also learned more about their motivations. They all seem to hate Daybreaker.”
Luna recounted the three dreams to Starlight, telling her about how Daybreaker had killed Scorpan’s brother, how she had conscripted unicorns to turn into her obedient guards, and how she and Eris drove Chrysalis insane by fusing her and Cadence together.
Starlight took all the stories with surprising grace. “I can’t see Chrysalis going so undercover she’d forget about being a changeling. But maybe this version is different.”
“She’s definitely different now,” Luna remarked. “Her mind and body are split with this world’s Cadence. From the sound of it, she might not even be able to transform anymore. Daybreaker didn’t even know Chrysalis was a changeling.” 
“Even with a name like Chrysalis?”
Luna shrugged. 
Just then, Daybreaker rose up from her sleeping bag. They were camped at the edge of the forest with a dozen guards circling the perimeter. Starlight kept a bubble of magic above them, trying to catch and disperse the smoke from the campfire so the other villains wouldn’t know where they were.
Daybreaker dusted herself off. “All that for a few blind guesses. Nightmare Moon wouldn’t have been so easy on them.”
“Be nice,” Luna replied. “You forget, I was Nightmare Moon once upon a time. But the dream realm works the same way, no matter who is at the helm. It’s your fault for traumatizing your enemies so much.” 
“Tsk, we have a lot of ground to cover. If you want to get back to your world alive, you better help the search.”
Since they were not pegasi, Daybreaker’s unicorn guards returned to their lord’s city to prepare for their next attack. Meanwhile, Luna and Starlight, who moved with levitation alone, flew in a line behind Daybreaker, scanning each pond they came across for signs of the villains.
The forest reminded Luna very much of the Everfree, although the wildness seemed somewhat subdued. Below, a few timberwolves chased fast-running rabbits while the sheen from the coat of a black jungle cat danced along the branches.
They came to a clearing that looked very much like the one they had seen in Chrysalis’s dream. 
“See?” Luna pointed with her horn. “Told you it was a clue.”
“We haven’t found them yet.”
“Still, it’s something.”
Though she would soon wish she wasn’t right. Luna landed just after Daybreaker, but before either of them could take the chance to look around and survey their surroundings, a tree trunk flew through the air and knocked them both over. Jumping out from the underbrush of the forest, Scorpan attacked.



 

Luna and Starlight found out too late what abilities Scorpan had. 
While his brother, Tirek, had wrought havoc and mayhem on an unprecedented scale in their world by draining and consuming magic from Equestrians, Scorpan seemed completely immune. Levitating above, Starlight rained down a storm of magic like billowing sheets of rain. But the gargoyle’s skin hardened at where her spells struck, turning stone-like and deflecting every shot.
Luna lifted the tree off herself and Daybreaker and immediately began harassing Scorpan by trapping him within a circle of magic. His skin even reacted to her barrier. He turned to stone and smashed through the spell as if it were glass.
“I would have killed him already if it were that easy.” Daybreaker roared and launched the fallen tree back at Scorpan. His skin returned to its fleshy form, but he was still a hulking brute of fur and muscle. 
“Nightmare Moon,” he snarled, pointing a gnarled finger at Luna, “stay out of this! Blood must be paid for her transgressions.”
Luna shot the tree out of his hand before he could swing it down like a hammer on Daybreaker. “Yeah, I know the feeling. But I can’t let you kill my sister.” She then lunged, striking with the point of her horn into his leg. 
Scorpan buckled, if only for a moment. He grabbed her by the neck, and Luna gagged from the fierce grip, but he was stopped short by a stone dropped from the sky. Starlight sent two more before the gargoyle grew frustrated and threw Luna at her. The two tumbled into the trees. 
Seeing her support fail so quickly sent Daybreaker into a fury. Ducking her head low, she charged and skewered him in the leg where Luna had struck, piercing fully through his knee and sending the tip of her horn to the other side. Quickly, she retreated before Scorpan’s claws hit their mark.
As he stumbled forward, she lit a fire on the grass and stretched her spell out until it encircled him. His skin may have turned to stone against magic, but against mundane fire, his fur scorched as easily as any other creature. 
“It will not be enough,” he sneered through the flames. The pond was not far, and both of them knew he would tolerate a few burns if it meant winning the fight. “My brother will be avenged. You will die.”
“Leap for the water and we’ll find out. I’ll cover you in so much magic you turn to solid stone and sink to the bottom.”
“The filly was right when she said you’d come. Now your city burns while you burn me.” He turned away as Daybreaker shot a beam of magic at his face. The strike hit lightly, bouncing off into dozens of rays when the skin of his cheek turned to stone and struck the trees around them. 
Luna and Starlight, recovered from their tumble, trotted out to see the standoff between Daybreaker and Scorpan. It was a fight she’d pay to see, Luna thought to herself, though the immunity to magic seemed like a lopsided advantage. She didn’t get her answer, however, as a pegasus came flying fast from the direction of the city.
“My lord,” she gasped, out of breath. “Your tower is in flames. There’s fighting and rioting in the streets of the city. They mean to overthrow you.”
Scorpan laughed. “That little pony of ours has a better head than you and your sister combined.” He lunged out of the flames and snatched Daybreaker up by the neck, squeezing so hard her eyes almost seemed to pop. “Let her have her little kingdom. This is all I need.”
“Don’t touch her!” Luna dug deep with her magic and lifted the tree roots beneath them up from the ground to entangle the gargoyle. But, his skin hardened and repelled magic as naturally as oil repelled water. The roots soon went limp and dropped back down to their place in the earth. 
Scorpan flashed his claws, raising them up high for the final blow.
So high up that Scorpan’s eyes, flushed with excitement, were clearly exposed. 
So exposed that Daybreaker simply had to lower her horn.
So much blood burst from his sockets that Luna swore it was enough to fill the pond once more.
He clutched his face and stumbled back. The ring of fire licked at his fur, his tail, and his leathery wings. Daybreaker tripped the beast over while he was still blinded, dropping him on his back. His exposed chest exploded with blood as she thrust her horn through his body. And so died the brother of Tirek, Scorpan. 
Daybreaker wiped her horn clean on the grass and then faced Luna. “If there is fighting in the streets, my guards will be able to handle the rabble. But we must fight Chrysalis and Cosy Glow.”
“No complaints here,” Luna said. “I can’t trust either of them to control this side of the portal. I much prefer you.”





The fight for the city escalated quickly.
As soon as they entered the walls, the three of them found themselves in a thick clashing of bodies as the guards attempted to keep control of the main road. Every lesser villain joined in the fight and it was impossible to be sure who was fighting for whom. Some factions seemed to help Daybreaker’s army maintain control, like the bodyguards Luna had seen outside the many casinos. Others, however, fought frantically among themselves, pushing and shoving in an attempt to raid the tower. 
Luna and Starlight did their best to maintain control of the crowd, using their magic to contain the changelings and dragons bearing down on the unicorn guards. Daybreaker, however, cared little for mercy. Fire and light spewed from her horn, and for a brief few seconds, the city was illuminated under a blinding aura, as if she were the sun itself, descended from the heavens. She left the road scorched, and the armours of a few of her soldiers could be counted among the piles of charred corpses. But Luna couldn’t deny that the rioters were greatly reduced. 
“Are you sure you want to keep helping her?” Starlight asked while she conjured a pit in the ground to trap a manticore someone had let loose.
“We’ve come all this way,” Luna replied. “Plus, I was serious about what I told her. Do you think our world would be safe if Chrysalis and Cosy Glow gained control here?”
Starlight sighed. “Of course not. I just hope I’ll be able to sleep at night without dreaming of burnt bodies.” 
They continued fighting for what felt like hours, but it could have been just a few minutes. At some point, Chrysalis had joined the fight. Luna wasn’t sure when, she only knew that she saw the pink alicorn flying through the air and tackling Daybreaker to the ground. A great burst of magic shook the buildings as they landed, followed by smaller aftershocks as they fought through the city.
Without the devastating fire from Daybreaker, the battle slowly turned against them. The unicorn guards were relentless fighters, their shots of magic creating burning potholes in the streets, but they could not overcome the uneven numbers. They found themselves slowly pushed towards the city walls. On the crest of a short distant hill, Luna could see the faint glow of the portal they had come through. 
She paused her fighting for a moment and soared up to find where Daybreaker had gone. She got her answer quickly, as a brilliant flash of light erupted on the opposite side of the city. From it, Luna spotted a dot hurling through the air. The dot grew bigger. And pinker. Chrysalis spun uncontrollably in the air, crashing into Luna. She would have fallen out the sky if not for a supporting field of levitation from Starlight.
“Get out of my way, Nightmare!” Chrysalis shoved Luna aside, spread her wings, and flew back to her fight with Daybreaker.
First Scorpan, now Chrysalis. Do I really still look like Nightmare Moon? Luna wondered to herself. The only one left was Cosy Glow. Of course.
Luna flew back down to the battle, where the unicorns were being swarmed by a mass of rioters.“Starlight,” she called out, “we have to get to the tower. This is Cosy Glow’s doing. We need to take her out to show the city who has control over it.”
“You go on ahead,” Starlight grunted, using her magic to reinforce a barrier projected by the other soldiers. “These guys are useless without me. If I go now, the rioters will have the city anyway.”
Luna nodded. There was a small concern in the back of her head that she was leaving her behind, but she was quickly reminded of what Starlight could do. Before a pride of Abyssinian cats could leap over the guards’ barrier, she teleported out into the rioting crowd and released a torrent of blue light. Magic flared from her horn, and the concrete on the street turned liquid, pulling down at least a hundred rioters in a single burst. A few pulled themselves out, but many remained trapped as Starlight shifted the concrete back to its solid state, trapping dozens by their legs.
Luna didn’t need any more convincing that Starlight would be fine without her. That simply left Cosy Glow to deal with.





The tower was as Daybreaker had left it. As Luna ascended its imposing steps, she passed by all the same rooms the guards had so hurriedly escorted her away from. The lower floors were as common as they could be: barracks, hospitals, pharmacies, even a small convenience store. For whom, Luna wasn’t sure. Daybreaker’s guards didn’t seem to need much in ways of convenience. 
But past the middle levels, she crossed into the seat of Daybreaker’s power. Though now abandoned, Luna could see the beds where unicorns would be strapped down for experiments. Surgery rooms hung rows of strange devices, small stubs of crystal and metal that were wrapped together in wires. If she was reading the schematics left behind, each augmentation was to be surgically implanted inside a unicorn’s horn, presumably to enhance their potency with magic.
The other experiments were not so pleasant. Luna came across massive syringes for hormone treatments, overdosing timid weak or timid unicorns on testosterone and an assortment of steroids. There were surgical rooms for lobotomies and electroshock “retraining.” Luna didn’t know how the procedures worked, but she understood what they could do to the mind, how dramatically they could change a pony and make them docile. Or in this case, obedient to a fault.
For the first time, she genuinely felt sick. Everything she had seen Daybreaker do was ordered by Eris and done against villains who could be just as cruel. But in this world, there were still innocent ponies. Eris had simply created a capital city for all villainy, concentrating evil into one place. Beyond, ponies still led lives with families and love. And Daybreaker was destroying that, just as Cosy Glow described.
“It’s repulsive, isn’t it?”
Luna didn’t need to turn around to know who spoke behind her. Cosy’s voice had fallen to a sad whisper, but there was a recognizable sharpness on her tongue.
“Scorpan’s dead,” she told the young filly just to see if it would faze her.
It didn’t. “He made his peace,” Cosy said. “I never expected him to beat you and Daybreaker, but I had hoped he’d do more damage. You look almost unscathed. And from the sound of things…”
By chance, as if to prove her point, a thunder crack echoed in from outside. It sounded like one of the casinos being brought down, most likely from Chrysalis and Daybreaker’s duel. 
“It seems Daybreaker is doing just fine as well,” Cosy Glow finished.
“Which is why you should surrender now, while you have the chance.”
“Why would I want to do that? I can see the fighting from the top of the tower. There’s chaos in the streets and the guards are outnumbered. This time tomorrow, I’ll be the one standing victorious.”
“Daybreaker might kill you before then,” Luna said. “Unless I capture you first and end this peacefully.”
Cosy Glow turned her back to Luna at that point, a bold decision given that she had just threatened her. But, she continued talking as she walked up the stairs to the top of the tower, evidently wanting Luna to follow. When they both reached the top, Cosy pointed out the window, down to the rioting villains who were swarming Starlight and Daybreaker’s forces. 
“You’re not going to stop me, Luna. Not because I’m strong enough to win, but because you’re smart enough to back down. You’ve seen it with your own eyes, how she keeps her fragile kingdom alive. With brute strength and threats. Her experiments advance knowledge just to make a new weapon to conquer new lands. That’s all she ever does, ever wants. To conquer. I am a true queen. I don’t need to conquer, only control. The whole world could be mine in a few years if I just had this city’s resources, and I’d do it peacefully.”
“Really?” Luna snorted. “Forgive me if the riots don’t convince me.”
“Don’t play coy. You know those riots happened because Daybreaker is useless. She can’t make ponies loyal to her unless they have circuits jacked into their heads. As soon as I showed up, half the city was ready to fight for me just because I sat in the tower and they believed they could get something from me. Why? Because the only thing that matters right now is who has more power.”
“That will always matter, you can’t change that.”
Cosy Glow laughed, much the same way a parent laughed when their child made a mistake just because they didn’t know any better. “This city could be made to obey if they had more things to care about. Control over the food, the coal, the building materials, the information and knowledge, the medicine, the ponies and labour, all those things matter and she’s letting it run wild outside this tower. If I make those villains depend on my leadership rather than fearing my might, then they’ll obey. They’ll want to obey, beg for it, even.”
“So you’re saying there’ll be peace, as long as every pony listens to you?” Luna chuckled and shook her head with amused disappointment. “You’re partly right, I suppose. But you’re thinking like a pony, not like a villain. It could never happen here.” She gestured to the tiny little villains fighting, so far down on the streets.
“So, you’re still going to throw away your life for her?”
Luna lowered her horn, getting into a proper fighting stance. “I’m going to capture you.”
“You will try, at least.” With her tiny body and enlarged alicorn wings, Cosy Glow shot through the air, glowing like a comet. 
Luna raised a barrier, but suddenly, it was unnecessary. A blinding flare of light flooded through the windows, and in the next moment, Daybreaker crashed through the glass using Chrysalis's body and landed on top of Cosy Glow.





When Daybreaker was done and the villains who thought they could rise up against a pony who commanded the sun itself were strung on poles outside the tower, there was hardly anything left to display. The experiments which Daybreaker had done to her unicorns were applied quickly to Cosy and Chrysalis. The circuits of crystal and metal did not simply enhance magical ability, it could control it. And, in the event Daybreaker needed to subdue a disobedient fighter, the circuit could also shut off one’s magic completely.
Cosy Glow, despite the magic she had absorbed to make her as strong as an alicorn, was still a child. Under the weight of two grown ponies, she struck her head with so much force she was unconscious immediately. Inserting the circuit into her took all of ten minutes, once she was under a surgeon’s knife.
Chrysalis had a rougher time. Luna stood silently outside the tower with Starlight, watching a few unicorn guards hoist up the body. Her face, Cadence’s face, was beaten into an unrecognizable pulp. The last minutes of the fight, after they had crashed into the tower, was filled with nothing more than Daybreaker trying to put her hooves as deep into Chrysalis’s face as possible. It was almost too easy to install a circuit into her; someone just had to push one through the crack in her horn.
She was still alive, but just barely. Blood splattered on the street every time she exhaled, and she sometimes writhed from the pain when she found the energy to move. 
“I can’t watch this,” Starlight said, turning away. 
“Can they recover?” Luna wondered out loud. Even in their world, some villains were stoned for eternity or shattered into a million pieces. But this wasn’t the same. It wasn’t the killing that bothered her so much, it was the suffering.
“You can’t put up with this,” Starlight said, choking on her words. “It’s… it’s unforgivable, that’s what it is.”
“Daybreaker is still—”
“A monster.”
“My sister.” 
“Who is a monster.”
“Who is a victim,” Luna refuted. “Eris ordered her to kill Tirek and attack Shining’s palace. She kept Daybreaker as a slave for a thousand years, as a weapon she could grind and sharpen whenever it dulled. Of course she created an army of engineered soldiers, she never learned how to be a leader, only how to be a tyrant.”
“You’re not suggesting she can be reformed, are you?”
“Isn’t that what the Nightmare Knights do?” Luna turned to Starlight to look her in the eyes.
“Yes. But shouldn’t there be a limit? Can anything be forgiven?”
Luna shook her head. “Forgiveness is something we can’t control. We can’t make others see us differently. But that doesn’t mean we stop trying. And I don’t want Daybreaker to stop improving. She just needs someone to show her the way.”
“But she beat Cade— I mean Chrysalis’s face in.”
“She did. And now I have to make sure she knows there are other options.” 
Starlight finally lowered her head, conceding the debate to Luna. The only consolation was that whatever Daybreaker did, she’d keep it to her world. That didn’t make the acts of evil any less terrible, but Starlight seemed to put it out of her mind for the moment. 
Luna flew up to find Daybreaker, who raised the sun and watched her city through shattered window frames. The glass had been swept away, but blood still stained the walls where Chrysalis had landed.
“I thought you would have left after I had their bodies tied up,” she said to Luna. “I’ll be taking them down for experiments soon enough, once the remaining revolters realize who truly runs this city.”
“Well, I haven’t given you your ticket yet,” Luna said nervously, flashing a small smile to ease the tension between them.
Daybreaker simply muttered back. “I don’t have time. A third of the city still thinks they can take this tower from me, which they will do if I go to your stupid little show. Leave.”
“So, that’s a no,” Luna said, “but not because you don’t want to. If you had the time, you would come?”
“Too bad we’ll never know.”
“Don’t be so sure. The lesser villains think they can win because they don’t respect you now. They think they have more to gain by fighting than going back to your system. I think I know how to prove them wrong.”
Daybreaker nodded. “Murder. The solution is murder.”
“What? No! You don’t always have to destroy something to get rid of a problem. You just need to make them understand who you are, and what they get if they join you again.”
“That just gives them the chance to betray me,” Daybreaker snarled.
“Or, the chance for you to make them reliant. They can’t fight you if they need you. Just like your unicorns, however unethical they may be.”
“Changing the minds of lesser villains sounds like a magic spell that neither of us has,” Daybreaker said. “They’re dull and short-sighted. How could you possibly make them understand the power I wield?”
Luna had been waiting to hear that question since she had spoken to Cosy Glow. With a big smile, she gave her earnest and confident answer. “I’m going to sing a song about you.”
Daybreaker froze her candid stare across the cityscape and slowly turned around to read Luna’s face. Her eyes narrowed in discomfort and frustration and she could hardly mutter her thoughts. “Whaaat?”