Trixie faced the setting sun, and watched as the last reddened hooftip crept across the limb of the wide, wide world. Her guns were in good hooves, her ensign on night-watch and, more importantly, the corporal riding herd on said ensign was both alert and on duty.
Her day was done, and she could take her rest.
Her dreams had been particularly bad for weeks, perhaps months.
And then, the other day, something broke.
Trixie hadn't dreamed since then. She'd entered the realm of sleep, and passed beyond knowledge of herself. She was just… here, again. Facing the sunset.
Facing the sunset with, perhaps, a bit less of that feeling of guilt and despair.
Having something of a psychotic break was, in a way, freeing. You could take all those bad feelings, and give them to your evil self. And if some insistent, drumming, throbbing something in the darkness took your evil self from you, didn't they take the bad with the… worse?
Trixie in the daylight still felt the twinges, still had to suppress the twitches, the bad reflexes.
But when the sky stained red and purple and the darker colors of dusk, the twitches and the twinges went away.
Until tonight, she'd rushed to her bed, for vestigial fear of what she might do in this intoxication of self.
Not tonight.
Tonight, she turned from the sunsetting side of the ship, and walked, dreamily, towards the starboard.
Towards the stars opening their evening eyes upon the turning of the year.
The little perro crouched in her room. The cavalls were running around in the corridors, yelling at each other, and she could hear the sound of screaming, blows, and squeals of pain somewhere in the disorienting distance.
Then somecavall broke one of the lamps down the corridor to the right, and the noise got worse.
Reina closed her door a little further, but not so far that she couldn't peer out into the empty chaos with one wide eye.
She tightly grasped the long, heavy instrument she'd borrowed from her bruixa cavall roommate's side of their room. It wasn't a club, and the delicate cavall device probably would break if she hit someperro with it, but it would do in a pinch if whatever that was out there tried to come in here.
Behind her, the darkness coiled in the unlit corners of the cabin.
Gilda stared in frustration at the hatchway leading into the envelope stowage space. She couldn't believe she'd forgotten this part of the ship existed. Well, to be honest, it was an even bet whether she'd ever noticed it in the first place. There was always something else that had to be done…
Quartermaster Strings had known it was up here. It was part of his domain. And according to Petty Tie Rod, Strings had last been seen by a member of Black Gang's black gang, going up into stowage to pull out some line to replace some frayed sheets on the aft ropeways. He'd never come back.
She could just barely see a thestral eye peering out of the hatchway. There were at least two batponies in there, and neither of them looked like either the missing Fruit Salad, or the ensigns. Or, for that matter, Ping, although the - was that a male?
Gilda wasn't sure. They were doing a good job of forting up in there.
She didn't have enough ponies and griffons to get all of the batponies under control. She had sent a lance and a half of Apple with Martingale to confine the rest of Baker to quarters. Gilda wasn't sure if Martingale was going to be successful in disarming them or not, Gleaming had just left with a detachment of Charlie to reinforce the lieutenant, and replace the griffons who had fallen out of the ranks with whatever sleeping curse that was going around.
Gilda had just lost another griffon, passed out right in front of her while she was giving the tom instructions to hold a corridor junction. Two more had been taken out of the ranks, to carry the twitching, unconscious trooper down to the triage being run by a harried Hawk Eye in the brig.
Which left Gilda, half a lance of Apple, and another platoon's worth of Charlie to keep however many batponies were forted up in the envelope stowage-hold-closet-whatever-the-buck-it-was in there, from coming out here.
She turned to Tailwind, hovering anxiously in the air above the entrance to the stowage, along the aft keel of the envelope.
"You're sure that there are just two hatches into this space?"
"Yes, sergeant! This one, and the stern hatchway. The stern one is kept dogged and barred. I don't think you could get through it from inside without an axe!"
Gilda turned an eye towards the thestral eye - no, two sets now. Definitely at least two batponies, and neither looked like the missing sergeant, corporal, or ensign.
Possibly ensigns, she hadn't gotten word of how much of the batpony command structure was AWOL.
"I don't think I trust them to not have an axe in there. Or a battering ram. Let's go see what's going on at the stern hatchway. Gustav, you have control of this access point. Don't let them out. No matter how many batponies are in there, they can only come at you two at a time. Can you handle that?"
"Master sergeant, don't teach your grandpa to suck eggs. I'll crack any that come out of that hole, sure enough," the grizzled old bird said.
"Very well!" Gilda said, with all the nervy enthusiasm she could muster. She turned her eyes to the west, where the last pinks and reds of twilight were being strangled by the tendrils of dusk. "Be sure to get some more lights up here. They'll have the advantage in the dark."
And whatever it was that was taking her griffons out of commission, just as everything went to Hades.
Ping could feel the eyes upon him, in his darkness. Judging him, worrying at him, fearing his loss of control.
"Be calm, shieldmaidens, spear-stallions, sergeant. We have time on our side," Ping lied to the darkness. He could almost feel the others, but they were silent, and feeling was all that he had left.
The masquerade was coming to an end. They had run him down, the major and her huge, hulking griffon, and the rest.
They were figuring it out, out there, somewhere in the darkness with the night-haunts and the nocnice, and whatever was disappearing their shieldmaidens whenever a bat's back was turned. Coming for his bats. Cornering them, in this ironwood-and-canvas cave in the heart of the infinite dark.
All Ping and his bats had was their faith in the Mother of Dreams. In prophecy, and promises.
But Ping had seen the heart of the Mother, the heart of the dream.
He had to trust in his bats' faith, because he no longer trusted in his.
His heart beat like a failing drum, one more strike, one more thump, one more measure with the drum-stick…
Lyra and her griffon chauffeur cruised cautiously in a wide circle around the spot where the Turul princess and her victim had plunged below the waves. Well, the approximate area, more or less.
It was hard to keep track of exactly what was what, out here over the waves. The sharp rocky spires towards the broken flank of the mountain mass to the west were dubious landmarks, when you were spinning around in a fragile bit of balsa wood, thunderforged steel plates, and vegi-leather strapping.
Especially as the dazzling rays of sunset were fading to the sullen bruise-fruit of twilight-racing-into-dusk.
And twice so, when you were dodging the half-hearted swipes of a monster, circling the same empty stretch of turbulent water as you, cawing piteously like a demonic foal who had lost her mother.
Had she lost her mother? What was the relationship between these monsters, anyways? The princess had talked about her monsterified cousins as if they were shambling, demonic ghouls, mindless and voracious. Did rocs have their own nests, their own young? Or were they just appetite on the wing, destruction without creation or a future?
To be honest, Lyra had only interacted with a roc once before, and had spent most of her time on the Burostani marches with that beast running from it, in between trying to observe the militia's fight with it at a distance. This one seemed… now that it wasn't trying to eat her, it was obviously half-grown.
Or was it a male? Did rocs, and by extension, turuls, have pronounced sexual dimorphism? She'd never been able to get close enough to one in Burrostan to sex them. Or find a nest, for that matter… Lyra tried to think through the shuddering after-effects of an equally pronounced adrenaline crash, and remember her notes from that half-written paper…
Where was the princess? Was she drowning the other roc, putting the poor mindless pony-eater out of her misery?
Was she drowning in her own right? How long could a turul hold her breath under the waves? Did her new goddess-given artifact…
And then the ocean erupted with a shocking suddenness, right under Lyra's rushing gig, as the other roc turned about in her - or his - circuit.
Two great black-and-white heads broke the surface with a great gout of seawater and foam, soaking Lyra's contrivance to the gunwales, and dousing poor, put-upon Gillie.
Lyra watched in awe as an enormous orca turned on its side, lifting a much smaller one into the air, and clearing the second one's blow-hole with her lip like a mother-whale removing the caul and after-birth from a newborn foal.
An enormous killer whale, wearing a white-brown-and-gold choker with a strikingly familiar cracked-milky pearl the size of Lyra's hoof.
The second, smaller whale moaned in a voice that was halfway between a roc's roar, and a foal's wail.
The circling roc answered that cry with her own unsettling yarble.
The princess-whale swam her charge around in circles, echoing the confused circuit of the remaining roc, and the outer orbit of wary, onlooking griffon flocks, and Lyra.
The moon crested the peaks of the mountains beyond the eastern side of the Haydriatic Sea, and moonlight lit the darkening waves upon which a reborn orca found her sea-flukes.
And then the greater whale gathered herself in the water, and at the peak of a cresting wave, lept into the crowded air between Lyra, the griffons and the remaining roc.
And miracle lit up the world to rival the moon's bone-cold glare.
The light of a shapeshifter becoming, a great brown raptor-queen on the rise where there had been a leaping whale, one milky-white eye-blink before.
And the up-rushing turul was upon the second roc before the startled monster was able to pull up, or break away from their glide.
And the mother hen took her second child down through the darkened, moon-glit waters of life.
Trixie stood among the screaming, yelling, and alarums, the silent dreaming heart of chaos. Her hooves rested beside a swivel-gun on the starboard side of the Princess's Bit, and watched the stars greet the rising moon, full and its mare's-head shadow stronger and more distinct than it ever had been.
Four stars swam in motion, like a school of fish gathering in the wake of leviathan. Four glowing lights, like lamps in the hornlight of unicorn priestesses, to greet the emergence of a luminescent goddess from her long exile.
Trixie bowed her head to greet the coming of Night.