The sirens went unheeded by most. They did not matter; there was no hiding from what was coming, not like from a Griffon bombing raid or a tornado. A basement or the cupboard under the stairs was not enough. Crouching low in a bathtub with some pillows piled on top would save nopony this time. Even a purpose-built bomb shelter in your backyard or beneath a public park was of no use. Just a warning that the end was nigh. Now is the time to make peace with yourself and with your Princesses. Now is the time to pray.
The dawn came, and the sirens sounded, and then they went painfully silent. Everything was silent. No planes rumbling overhead, no cars on the roads, no happily laughing foals in the streets. Just an oppressive stillness, like the hour before a summer storm breaks. Ponies huddled miserably together, clinging to their families, their pets, or just sitting out on the porch with their spouse or lover, watching the sun come up, the last sunrise they would ever see.
And what a sunrise it was. Celestia made damn sure of it. The skies were clear, a brilliant ripple of purple-red on the horizon spreading across the vast empty canvas until the whole sky looked like an abstract painting. And then the glowing orb itself crested the edge of the world, and everything was golden, perfectly golden, like the doors of heaven had swung open and the Princess herself was there to welcome every single one of her subjects home.
The only parts of Equestria that were not silent were the places where Griffon military forces were on the move. The grinding clank of tank tracks and endless dirge of wheels as convoys of trucks pounded the dirt roads into mud and heavy armoured vehicles tore up the asphalt beneath their bulk, jets screeching overhead in support, the low throbbing whir of helicopters. It was an army on the march, but it may as well have been a training exercise, as they met no opposition. Trench lines and bunkers sat abandoned, doors swinging gently in the breeze like some horror movie set. The towns they passed through seemed deserted. Canterlot, the distant capital, was their goal. They knew the Princess was there. Their satellites had intercepted the radio and video transmission from the palace to their strange collective shibboleth, the lifeboat that the ponies believed in, but the Griffons did not.
It hardly seemed a fair fight any longer. There had been strong resistance around the spaceport at New Zebrica, but that was all. Nopony seemed to care about defending anything else. The Equestrian Army had melted away, like a snowflake landing upon the tongue. Just as King Grissom had planned. The whole of Equestria, consumed by fear and devoutly following the lies of their Princess, had simply given up. They had no will to resist, and soon, the whole of the country would be under Grissom's claw, prostrate and begging for a real leader, one who had not become swallowed by a messiah complex and a desire to become like a bell-ringing lunatic with a 'The End Is Nigh' placard strung around their neck, both at the same time. Celestia had led her country to ruin, and now she was about to deliver it wholesale to the Kingdom of Griffonia.
In Canterlot, Celestia and Luna stood together on the high balcony of the palace, watching the sunrise together, two sisters enjoying a final peaceful moment, a warm and loving embrace, a gentle kiss on the forehead. The city below seemed empty, though both knew hundreds of thousands of desperate ponies were down there, somewhere, cowering in corners or tucked up in bed shivering with fear, all knowing their only chance of survival came from within the walls of the tower the royal sisters were standing upon.
They were all there; Cadence, Twilight, Applejack, Rarity, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash, Starswirl, Shining Armor, Sunburst, Starlight Glimmer. Plus a cadre of a hundred and fifty trained sorcerers and military barrier-magic experts, the best of the best of those who had not been assigned to Friendship One. It would take every ounce of strength in their bodies, all of them combined, and it would still likely not be enough.
Celestia and Luna entered the throne room, where the others waited, face drawn and downcast. Some, like Rainbow Dash, seemed keen to get to the action and finally be doing something. All the waiting, all the tension of the last five years of public knowledge, was coming to a head. This was it. They would do, or they would die.
Celestia thought about giving a speech, but she had given enough of those during her long life. Besides, she had given one a short while earlier, to the crew of Friendship One, now a very fast-moving dot somewhere out there, outrunning physics itself, tearing through the ether like a bullet through the air- or else it was now a very fast-moving cloud of atomised debris, condemned to drift for eternity through the dark and lonely abyss.
Whatever the fate of their brave colonists, their focus was here and now. New Equis was, quite literally, a whole new world. Even if they survived the impending holocaust, the battered survivors might never learn of the fate of Friendship One at all. It could remain forever a mystery.
"It is coming," Celestia said suddenly. "I feel it."
They all turned to look at her. A sudden shock, sweeping through her system just as it swept through her Sun. The gamma ray burst was in the solar system, its powerful radiation rippling across the surface of the star, as though a pebble had just been hurled into a pond at lightspeed. A violent plume of superheated matter burst from the far side of the Sun, like blood spattering from an entry wound, the radiation having raised the surface temperature rapidly, but the Sun itself would not die. Even the gamma ray burst was not strong enough for that, not at the distance it had been travelling, gradually widening the beam, gradually losing focus and energy density over so many trillions of miles, as the months and years rolled past. The Sun was much too big, much too powerful an entity in its own right, to be destroyed or severely damaged by the blast. But a planet?
Oh, a planet was quite an exquisite morsel for it to chew upon.
"We have minutes at best," Celestia informed everypony. They moved into position, pre-planned, a wide diamond formation. The Elements of Harmony formed an inner ring around the four Alicorns, while everypony else clustered at one of the four points of the diamond. At a nod from Celestia, everypony present closed their eyes. Their horns glowed. The Elements glowed around the necks of their bearers. Slowly but surely, casting the same protection spell and augmented by the mysterious magic of the Elements, they formed a dome above the palace, then above the city, spreading outward and expanding farther from its source with the same creeping certainty as the gamma ray burst. A city could be protected by one Alicorn easily; Cadence had used her magic to defend the Crystal Empire when needed, and Celestia had protected Canterlot against Luna's rage centuries ago before banishing her. To protect a planet was altogether a different prospect, which was why all the Alicorns, the Elements, Starswirl and the other hundred and fifty unicorns were combining their strength.
The glimmering dome rose from Canterlot, alarming Griffon military observers watching the city via live spy-sat link. They calmed once they realised it was just a shield. Perhaps Celestia feared a nuclear attack in retaliation for her use of atomic weaponry? But King Grissom had no intention of deploying his nuclear arsenal; why would he, when he was conquering the whole of Equestria with contemptuous ease? There was essentially no resistance now, other than a few scattered squads here and there who were determined to die for their flag and their Princesses in a more meaningful manner. The rest were just waiting for annihilation from beyond the stars, and that made them easy prey, rounded up in vast numbers where they still wore the uniform, and simply dissipating like a hot breath on a cold night as the Griffonian army advanced, scattered to the winds by their groundless fears.
Grissom did not want to rule over a dead land, ruined by radiation, and though a small part of him feared that Celestia might launch all of Equestria's missiles out of spite or panic, he doubted that would be the case. She expected death on an even grander scale to be imminent. Her conviction was so great it seemed unlikely she would use those weapons until her belief was truly shattered when nothing happened at all. By that time, by the time her disillusioning was complete, the Griffonian army would have already captured Canterlot and, quite probably, the missile launch sites as well. Even now, large transport planes, escorted by squadrons of fighters, were carrying Griffon drop-companies to the missile fields, where they would hurl themselves from the open ramps and doors and descend with frightening speed upon the silos and their command bunkers. There was no Equestrian air force left to oppose them. The radar stations they passed over lay dormant. No missiles leapt up to meet them, so great was Equestria's collapse. Like a black hole, the nation and its once-proud army had turned in on itself, an empty shell, a nothingness. Only distance stood between Grissom and total domination. Distance, and time.
The shield expanded, puzzling and worrying some Griffon observers. Perhaps it was not just a shield, but some kind of magic weapon? There was puzzlement until somebody reminded the assembled generals and ministers that the pony belief in the coming end was so great, they would continue to keep up the pretence until the last possible moment. Until all doubt had gone that they had made a mistake. Until the Griffons were kicking in the palace doors and gunning down the Princesses, distracted as they would be by their magic. Producing such a shield required great concentration. Attempting to produce a shield of this magnitude would be enough to put one into an almost catatonic state; there would be no resistance in the palace. The nearest units to the city were an hour away.
But they did not have an hour.
The gamma ray burst swept on through the void, invisible, like a tidal wave that could not be seen. There was no warning of its approach. It was like a torpedo fired by a submerged submarine, running silent and deep until it struck its target. Though the shield surrounded the planet as though it were in a snowglobe, it was translucent, and the first indication anybody on the ground got of the sudden storm was when the heavens came alive with auroras, even in the morning sky. It looked like the world was inside of a disco ball, some cosmic nightclub kaleidoscope nightmare evolving over their heads. Outside of the shield, hard radiation battered itself against the barrier, like a shark pounding on the hull of a glass-bottomed boat. It looked for a moment like it would hold; gamma ray bursts do not last long, seconds to minutes at the most. But then the full bore of the storm struck with a power unmatched anywhere in the universe.
The shield wavered, flickered like a lightbulb, dimmed, burst back into newly resurgent strength as Celestia and Luna pushed themselves to the brink of death, straining their bodies and draining them of their very essence to keep the shield up. But it was not enough. The shield bent and buckled, and was punctured first approximately one thousand miles off of the southern coast of Equestria, over the open and empty expanse of the Southern Ocean. Here, the radiation rushed through like water flowing through a hole in a dam, and just like a dam breach, that undermined the rest of the structure.
The waters of the Southern Ocean beneath the breach began to boil as they were suddenly heated by the onrushing tide of electromagnetic energy. Huge clouds of steam burst from the surface, superheated and scalding. An unfortunate Griffon frigate, patrolling the nearby Fairmile Islands, was turned into a pressure cooker, frying its crew inside its metal hull, the fat and muscle melting from their bones.
The skies above the sea turned to fire as the radiation ripped through. Clouds vanished in the sudden heat haze, Celestia's gorgeous sunrise now replaced with a hellish skyscape, like something from the twisted mind of a half-demented artist instead of the earlier picturesque tableau. Flames burst into horrible life upon the shores of the Fairmile Islands, grass and trees and birds igniting, the sands on the beaches fusing into glass. The same thing happened on the shore of Equestria's southern coastline. The shield, now fatally undermined, collapsed entirely. Its source, Canterlot and its palace, turned to fire in a heartbeat.
In the upper atmosphere, the ozone layer was torn to shreds, stripping away the protective shroud that shielded the planet from cosmic rays and solar flares. There was just too much energy hitting it, too fast, too hard. A gamma ray burst from a more distant star would have still damaged the layer, but most of its harm would have been absorbed by the atmosphere, the thick and cloying air that would have cushioned the blow and absorbed the radiation like the lead shielding or tank of water around a nuclear reactor. The farther away it originated, the less damage it would do. Sigma-225b had been fired at point blank range in cosmological terms, and its impact reflected that proximity.
In Griffonian military HQ, radio links, relayed by satellite from their ground and air forces in Equestria, began to cut out one by one. Video screens went blank. On the other side of the world, the Griffons and their King could only watch on with confusion, and a rapidly spreading sense of dread that maybe, just maybe, the Princess had been right after all.
In Canterlot, the palace burned to the ground, towers of flame crumbling, with molten gold running down the marble walls like candle wax. The Princesses, the Elements and their bearers, and all those who had remained behind were gone.
In Hoofburg airbase, the heat of the burning sky ignited the rocket fuel reserve, sending a huge billowing plume of fire belching forth from the earth. The staff housing, where the families of the launch team huddled, glowed with the heat, melting away.
In Hoofston, the mission control team for Friendship One were incinerated at their desks, the last message from Equis sent mere seconds ago, but lost forever in the blizzard of incoming radiation.
Near Ponyville, the entire Everfree Forest blazed, a hideous inferno, the weird and varied denizens of that oddly magical place nothing more than ash beneath the rain of pine resin and exploding sap as tree after tree succumbed to the end.
In Manehattan, city of glass and steel, a million windows shattered in the heat as the sky turned into a hellscape, something drawn from Discord's darkest visions. The lord of chaos had long since disappeared, retreating to his own pocket dimension. Even he could not stop this.
In Griffonia, as the screens went dark, the military commanders began to receive panicked messages from units stationed thousands of miles from the initial impact point, not yet affected by the catastrophe but able to feel its peripheral effects. They could see something was very wrong, and their radios crackled heavily with static.
"Viper 1-5 to command, something's going on out here! That shield is gone, I say again, the Equestrian shield is gone!"
"Sunray 6 to all units on this net, standby. Our rad-meters just spiked off the charts, awaiting confirmation."
"Command, this is Angel 2, emergency traffic! The whole sky is on fire to the west!"
The Griffons were powerless to act, or even to respond to their units, because they simply didn't know what was going on. Magic? Nuclear detonations? Or were the prophetic words of the Princess from five years earlier, broadcast on every channel and station and frequency, coming true? Was this really the disaster she had claimed, or was it a trick, a final, last-minute deceit? Had she been fooling them all along, lulling them into some false sense of security so she could unleash her superweapon? Was her spaceship actually that which it had been feared initially, some kind of orbital weapons platform?
King Grissom flew into a momentary rage, thinking Celestia had outsmarted him after all, but calmed himself as more panicked reports flooded in from border posts. There were desperate calls for help, messages of huge spikes in radiation and temperature, and one by one, those reporting in went silent, their feed cut, a hiss of static on the line, like a million angry bees. One underground bunker complex reported a thick, brown mist coming in through their ventilation system. They went quiet moments later.
Another reported switching to internal ventilation because their oximeters and flowmeters were showing that almost no actual air was coming in from outside. They too dropped silently off the radio net shortly after.
"Get me some satellite imagery of Canterlot!" one general demanded. He was curtly informed that the spy satellite they had been using for that purpose had gone offline.
"Then get me some fucking imagery of somewhere else!" he replied. His anger turned to deep concern when he was told that there was not one single satellite available. They had all gone offline- shut down, destroyed, signal blocked, nobody was sure. But they were not responding. None of them, even the ones in orbit over Griffonia. Not just spy-sats, but weather satellites, pollution monitoring satellites, communications satellites. They tried piggybacking on the civilian satellites that relayed television and radio signals, but they, too, had gone dark.
"An EMP!" the general snarled. "Has to be. By the gods, that thing she built up there..." He paused. That made no sense. An electromagnetic pulse that powerful would destroy all of Equestria's satellites, too. Come to that, it would likely destroy all of their electronics, full stop. But then, if Celestia was willing to run her country into the ground and see it laid low economically and militarily, might she take this final, mad step? Perhaps she was aboard that ship after all, riding away to glory and to a new world while leaving her great rivals, the Griffons, stumbling round in the stone age?
But the scientist in him (and he had a doctorate in chemistry, as a former head of Griffonia's chemical weapons programme) said that no EMP weapon could be built that was powerful enough to affect an entire planet. An entire hemisphere, yes, maybe, with a big enough warhead and an altitude high enough. But Griffonia was on the other side of the planet, or at least most of it was, and so were her domestic satellites. Any weapon detonated, even in space, would find the huge, rocky bulk of Equis lying in its path, and its radiation attenuating away in the whisper-thin upper atmosphere. A nuclear detonation threw radiation in all directions, and did not concentrate enough of its force to affect something that was thousands of miles away. No, an EMP weapon could not do that. This had to be coming from something- or somewhere- else. A great sinking feeling gripped his heart, dragging it slowly down into the icy depths of true realisation.
Yes, the Princess had been speaking the truth. The only thing he could think of that was powerful enough to do that was either an enormous solar flare, which they would have been able to detect- or a gamma ray burst, which they wouldn't.
They had seen nothing, yet if they were to be looking out from the opposite hemisphere, from Equestria or New Zebrica or the Southern Ocean or the great archipelago that ran like a spine through that vast and mighty sea, they would have been able to see a light in the sky. A small, faint light compared to the brilliant, blazing sun, but enough to be visible even in the soft daylight of early morning, like the half-moon that hangs dimly in the blue sky in winter. This was the death glow of Sigma-225b, ten lightyears away, an echo from the past, for the star had been gone for a decade. Only now was the light from that terrible, catastrophic event reaching Equis, and it was bringing hell along with it.
In the irradiated, heat-scarred ruins of Equestria, there was no life. One half of the planet had been scoured clean, not just of civilization, but of the very air itself, the huge pulse of radiation overpowering everything, out-muscling Equis's protective magnetic field and atmosphere which would have kept the planet safe from a more distant or less energetic event. Most of the atmosphere had been torn apart at a molecular level, so intense was the energy directed at it, and reassembled by a chain reaction into large quantities of nitrous oxide, a brown fog which was what the Griffonian bunker had been seeing, seeping through their vents. This process would have happened more slowly and on a more limited scale after a less severe burst, a glancing blow or a widely dispersed distant explosion, but the concentration of gamma rays, x-rays and other highly energetic particles meant that it was happening on a vast scale, turning most of the hemisphere into a brown, hellish wasteland, covered with thick cloying fog instead of a true atmosphere.
On the other side of the world, there was panic.
The communications net had gone dark. Both the military and civilian leadership of Griffonia had no contact with their own units, their own cities, their own citizens. The national power grid had gone down; not all at once, but in a rolling series of cascading blackouts, starting in the westernmost provinces- those on the periphery of the dead hemisphere- and gradually moving eastward, a combination of power shedding, overloading and whatever damage the gamma ray burst was doing. The military had backup generators and so did the government buildings and royal palace, but the operators at their radio sets were not getting through to anybody.
"Any unit on this net, any unit on this net, report status, over!"
"This is Griffonia Command calling all vessels at sea, respond on this frequency if you hear this message."
"Is anybody there? Anybody at all? Please, somebody, come in! I don't even care if you're a pony, just...tell me there's somebody else still out there!"
The airwaves were not silent, for they thrummed with static; severe, harsh bursts of white noise filled the headsets of the radio operators. The radiation detectors posted at the entrances to the palace as part of its security system were ticking away like a field of a thousand croaking frogs. The guards outside wore respirators and gas masks as they stood watch over the hideous red-brown sky that had replaced the fine, golden evening of a few minutes earlier. So swift had the end of the world been that most Griffons didn't even know it had happened yet; they imagined a power failure, perhaps an Equestrian bombing or missile attack on a local power plant, not realising the scale of the issue. The red sky? Well, at night, that was good, wasn't it? Shepherd's delight, they said. As they lit candles in their lounges and murmured through the darkened streets, the Griffons, with the exception of their leadership, remained ignorant of the facts.
Their world was dying.
A harsh, stinging rain began to fall; a dirty rain, brown like the sky. The guards retreated beneath the porticoes of the palace. There shouldn't have been rain. It wasn't in the forecast. It burned, too, like being lightly pelted with a stinging hail. This wasn't right. Not right at all.
Darkness fell quickly, partly due to the time of day and partly due to the soot and ash swirling through what remained of the atmosphere. There was an eerie quiet hanging over Griffonstone. The evening birdsong chorus was silent. They said the animals were the first to know when something was wrong- before an earthquake, for instance. Perhaps that gloriously reddish sunset was not a benign symbol. Not on this particular night. Now, slowly, the Griffons in the streets began to realise what their King and his ministers already knew. Something was definitely very badly wrong.
The winds came next, howling gales blowing out of the hills, off of the sea, from seemingly nowhere. Whipping across the land, carrying unwary Griffons into the air, knocking over light poles and trees, stripping tiles from rooftops. This, like the acidic rain, was definitely not in the forecast. Hurricane-strength gusts took cars and fences and streetlights on a merry journey down the street. The anemometers atop the Griffonian National Meteorological Observatory registered their highest ever reading- two hundred and ninety miles per hour- before they were ripped from their moorings. Buildings collapsed. Trucks and heavy intercity buses were tossed about like toys, hurled into the air above the darkened cities and towns of Griffonia. Panic descended rapidly across the population. The Griffons had their own ancient creation myths, and they had their own apocalyptic myths, too. Except they weren't just myths anymore. The winds, the bloody sky, the claw of their ancient primitive god enveloping their world and squeezing it in a death-grip.
The crazed atmospheric conditions caused by the sudden, intense heating of one half of the planet had caused the winds, dramatic and sudden, as the air sought to regain its equilibrium, rushing from a place of high pressure to one of low pressure. The ozone layer was all but gone, torn asunder by the bath of hard radiation. The atmosphere itself was crumbling; some of it had been torn free and hurled into space by the highly energetic collisions and sudden heating, while some had been converted by the rapid chemical reactions into nitrogen dioxide. One hemisphere was gone, but the other was not safe.
The gamma ray bust was still blazing through space like a river of radiation, and the planet was slowly, inexorably rotating about its axis. Every second that passed brought more of its surface into the firing line, fresh, virgin territory for the burst to work upon. Now, it was Griffonian territory that was burning, the fires igniting under the death-gaze of the burst, spreading rapidly and ferociously, fanned by the winds, all-consuming.
In Griffonstone, King Grissom held his head in his claws and wept.
The windows of the palace crashed in, pelted by debris from the raging, howling storms. Great stained-glass triumphs depicting his predecessors now lay scattered in a million jagged pieces before him.
Just like my kingdom.
He wept, he laughed the bitter and broken laugh of one who finally knows they have been foolish, ignorant. The laugh of a griffon who spent a lifetime smoking and is surprised when he finally gets diagnosed with lung cancer. The laugh of a griffon who abused his wife and is surprised when she leaves him. The laugh of a griffon utterly convinced it was his enemy who was the fool, but who was surprised when he turned out to have been the blind one all along.
He summoned his generals, told them to do what they could, save who they could.
Then he drew his pistol and put a bullet in the side of his head.
The gamma ray burst continued unabated for forty-seven minutes and twelve seconds. Then, it ended as abruptly as it began, as if somebody had turned off a giant, invisible light. There had been longer bursts recorded in the past, some from very distant supernovae lasting several hours. But forty-seven minutes was more than enough.
Half of the planet was dead, a sterilized and silent world save for the howling of the winds and the crackling of the fires. The other half was dying, a terminal patient with little time left. The destruction of the ozone layer alone would doom them all; the constant bombardment from ultraviolet light from the sun would cause cancers and cripple food production. The ash from the fires and the photochemical smog would coat the world, hanging in the upper atmosphere like a blanket, cooling it. What was left of the atmosphere was a twisted wreck of its former self, with acidic nitrogen-rain falling from the skies, nitrogen smog rolling like morning mist across the landscape, storms raging.
It would not take long for the survivors to begin to suffocate; the oxygen concentration of this new and badly wounded atmosphere had dropped below survivable levels thanks to the effects of the blast. Many griffons had forgotten about Celestia's dire predictions. Most had not believed her anyway, their trust firmly rooted in Grissom's competent leadership and not in the mythos of the Princess. Large numbers of them died without even knowing what had befallen their world. Those who did remember cursed their King for not believing, just as he had cursed himself at the very end.
It didn't matter now. Nothing mattered now. It was all over. The war, so close to being won, had been lost after all.
The last griffons alive on the planet were members of the Griffonian Navy's submarine corps. Their ballistic missile boats were nuclear-powered and could stay at sea for a year before their reactors needed maintenance. Their crews, surfacing to find their throats closing up from the particulates and their lungs gasping for sufficient oxygen, no radio communication with headquarters, and no visibility thanks to the smog, panicked and returned below the surface. They died several months after G-Day when their food supplies ran out, and with them died the Griffonian military, the proud martial tradition which had led them to within touching distance of victory. So close, yet so far, denied by something that came from among the stars and destroyed everything.
Among those same stars, trillions of miles away, one small speck of the old, dead world sailed onward.