Mayor Mare leaned over to one of her assistants, as the Ponyville residents started to murmur uneasily. Even without Pinkie and Twilight to arrange the replacement celebrations, despite the damage to the town and the shock of the injuries to the fillies, their attempt at an Eclipse Banquet hadn't been that bad. The Cakes had even managed to get all the desserts made without half being ‘taste-tested’ by Pinkamena.
"I don't suppose the eclipse is supposed to be doing that, is it?"
"I dont think so, Mayor - according to Twilight it was only supposed to last a few minutes. And she didn't say anything about those colours, or the stars going out."
"Oh. What sort of colour would you call that, anyway?"
"I could always as- oh! Mayor! Look!" He was pointing towards the Canterhorn. Something like a huge black cloud, dwarfing the mountain, was forming over the capital.
***
She had been called, and She had answered. Her spawn croaked their adoration, and mindlessly She crawled out of the gulfs of Yaddith to accept their offering. Her tendrils brushed the world, dissolving the sky, and She drooled in brainless anticipation of the lives She vaguely sensed below. Her juices would rain down across the planet, mutagenic and unspeakable, and nothing would remain. Her substance pressed against reality. She hungered, and Her Young strove to open space and time completely for Her gaping, oozing bulk.
***
"What is that!?" screamed Rarity, after she opened her eyes and seen the billion-ton bulk of the Dark Mother materialising two miles overhead.
Rainbow Dash's wings spasmed, as she fought the contrary instincts to flee, and to stay and protect her friends. Loyalty won.
"We got to get back up there!"
"Near that thing?!"
"We've got to help the girls!"
"Ah. Since you put it like that..."
***
“I take it back - you’re BOTH out of your minds.” said the other guard stallion. “You’d have to be completely nuts to even think of doing that deliberate...“ He noticed the expressions on the mares and Shining Armor. “Alright, shutting up now.”
“Everypony into position.” murmured Armor, and the unicorns lined up, muzzles nearly pressed against the oily magical barrier. The monsters inside twitched and stirred, and four shifted oddly as they became suspicious of some threat, but their croaking never faltered, only became louder and more urgent. The victims they clutched still twitched and spasmed, but had long ago fallen silent. “Rest of you, back.” Twilight trembled, remembering the sounds, the smell of a scene from somewhere else, where hairless bipeds had sacrificed things far too like ponies, to creatures just like these. There were screams across Canterlot. Or inside her head. But she knew. She knew what was coming.
Fluttershy was staring up, and gave a tiny squeak of mortal terror, like a mouse seized in the claws of an owl. Spike was hyperventilating, eyes huge, puffs of flame shooting from his mouth and nostrils where he sat paralysed with fear of the thing filling the skyey void, and his claws dug into the paving stones. Applejack followed their gaze, and sat down, hard. “Oh, sweet Nelly... Twi.. Twilight! Armor! You better hurry up there.” Twilight didn’t look up. She remembered what Shub-Niggurath had looked like, when summoned into sane realities. Five of the Hussars broke and fled, fleeing blindly, simple animal terror moving them to flee, to fly, to vainly seek some place to avoid that awful vision in the sky.
Armor was staring, as well, until Twilight shouted. “Eyes down! Now! It has to be now!”
He trembled, half-choking, and gave the order. “On the count of three... One... Two...”
The unicorns closed their eyes, and their horns lit up. Pinkie’s ears flopped.
“THREE!”
The unicorns vanished. And the Dark Young exploded.
***
The Herald was falling back from the alicorns, his form smoking with conceptual injuries, his reserves of power drained faster than he could replenish by every attack he fended off. Neither would be recognizable to the ponies in the world behind him. Their forms blazed with potency, their strikes enough to shatter countries, their beams of force stabbing at his core. He felt the worlds tremble, and the rifts quiver. He still had energy for what passed for words.
“Your Majesties... you are beginning to frustrate me...”
***
Scraps of the Dark Young twitched and flopped across most of the garden. Twilight and the unicorn stallions stood knee-deep in the oozing black remains, residual teleportation magic leaving the alien substance smoking and charred. Overhead, the thousand maws of the Dark Mother moaned once and vanished with a ground-shaking peal of thunder that shattered windows across most of Canterlot. The stars returned, no longer obscured by her smoking bulk.
The ponies slumped, exhausted by their efforts, and their terror. Some of the unicorns had glimpsed the full size and form of Shub-Niggurath as they had traversed the space between spaces, and those unfortunates were curled in foetal positions, holding themselves as they gibbered. Even the luckier ones were having problems, since they're just deliberately teleported into another living creature.
“If you don’t mind,” said the argumentative guard, as gobbets of half-cooked alien flesh and ichor dribbled down his forehead “I’m going to be sick now.” He threw up noisily into the mess, which at least added a touch of colour.
Applejack was tending to the hysterical Fluttershy, even as her own flesh crawled at the memory of the thing that had nearly broken into the world. Spike was still half-stunned, and slumped against similarly catatonic ponies. Pinkie hugged Twilight tight, despite the ghastly slime and chunks. “I knew you’d come back to save everypony, Twilight. You’re the smartest mare I know.”
Twilight shook her head. “I couldn’t have done anything without you and Spike getting rid of Herald like that. Sending him to Celestia? That was the smart thing.”
Pinkie smiled. “I’m not clever like you, Twilight – I just think quickly sometimes.” She gave her friend a little nuzzle. “Uh, oogh! Monster guts don’t taste very good, do they?”
Armor climbed out of the pile, stomping on a still-twitching organ until it stopped. Twilight noticed his aversion to looking up into the sky, and the slightly mad way his eyes were rolling under the hair plastered to his brow. At least he was maintaining a semblance of control. “Got.. got to hand it to you Sis, your idea worked much better than just trying to take the fight to them. Right! Start setting these things on fire, I don’t want them getting up again. You two mares OK?” Fluttershy and Applejack nodded uncertainly, after a pause. “Get all the injured to the infirmary, we still have to save the Princesses.” He gave a slightly deranged chuckle. Whatever was happening behind the rifts was painful to look at. Nothing was recognizable anymore. A smell like lightning or sea ice seemed to gust from the rifts, and the lawn around them was twisting and shrivelling strangely.
His sister shook her head. He was glad of the distraction. “We might not need to. And it might be a really crazy idea to go in there after them.”
Pinkie tilted her head “Since when has that ever stopped us, Twili?”
Twilight shuddered, and looked down at her hooves, then composed herself. “Applejack, did anything Herald said seem like a lie to you?”
Applejack paused. “Uh, you mean actual lies, or things we didn’t want to hear? I don’t think so, Twilight. Apart from that thing he told Armor about not hurting us. But he said he might defend himself if anypony attacked him, too. I dunno, hon – he might just have been a dang convincing lying snake.”
Fluttershy looked up, hurt, from where she was huddled beside Spike. “Actually, Applejack, most of the snakes I know-“
“Not now, Fluttershy.” interjected Twilight “I thought so. If he’d actually lied in front of you, then you might have caught him out in something.” she shuddered, remembering everything he’d said and shown her... if it was all true...
“Oh, I get you! He said the Princesses would find a way out themselves, didn’t he?”
“Did he? That’s good! But I meant about the Princesses being able to cast him out, if we could get the fillies’ souls back off him first. Er... where’s the bottle?”
Applejack exchanged a horrified glance with Fluttershy, Pinkie and Spike, and the four rushed back over to the parapet – just as Rainbow Dash and Rarity cleared it at near-Rainboom speed, then braked hard. Armor glanced up, expression deadpan. "Hey, Rainbow Dash. You missed all the fun." then slumped back and stared into the sky, marveling at his new appreciation for unobscured constellations.
Fluttershy helped Rarity down, and brushed noses with Dash, “Rarity! Dashie! You got the fillies... souls? Then? They’re not hurt?”
“Hard to tell, dear, but the bottle’s still intact. Left it safe down below, just in case. Rainbow was fast enough to catch up, before any of us reached the bottom. NOT an experience I want to repeat in a hurry, I can tell you. Does anypony have a towel?”
“I got us back up here as soon as I could. We were going to try and surprise that stallion from behind. Where is he? Ah... what was all that with the sky? And how’d you do... that... to the tree things?
Twilight considered the second question, and shuddered. “Rainbow... you don’t want to know. You really don’t want to know.” Her friends were shocked at the mix of expressions that ran over her face, and Rarity immediately moved to support her.
“Well, come sit down, Twilight, you look dreadful. I’ll try and find you some towels. And possibly a scrubbing brush.”
"Yes. A sit down. A good sit down.... that'd be good for all of us." Twilight sat down, hard, and automatically reached out to hug her assistant hard to her chest. "Thank you Spike. You looked after me, didn't you? What happened to your eye?"
Spike reached a claw up to touch the hoofprint bruise. "Nothing, Twilight. It's nothing." He said, and buried his face in the unicorn's mane.
They looked nervously at the trembling rifts, as traumatised ponies set the remnants of the Dark Young ablaze behind them. "So... did Herald say how long it would take for the Princesses to break free?”
***
Nyarlathotep flung a limb out between himself and the Sisters. They danced backwards, his ichor virulently caustic even to them, and the Outer God pressed home his momentary advantage. He hissed his intentions, and the alicorns screamed in distress as they realised there was nothing they could do to prevent it.
***
The ponies couldn’t judge how long it had been. The Sun and Moon were still frozen high above, locked in shadow. With the panic of events wearing off, there was only aching exhaustion and support as they leaned against each other, feeling their muscles burn and their minds scrabble for some remnant of sanity in a damaged world. Twilight whimpered slightly, as she felt Herald’s knowledge washing over the edges of her mind once more.
Pinkie looked around at her friends, concerned by their thousand-yard stares, and the way they flinched at unexpected touches. “So.... I don’t suppose anypony wants to play a game of I Spy?”
Rarity looked over, and gently let her down. “Not right now, dear. Maybe later.”
Pinkie looked crestfallen, and toyed with her Element, and flicked a hoof at a pebble from the garden. Then yelped, and looked down at her knee. “Ow! Pinchy Knee! Pinchy Knee! Something scary is going to happen!”
Rainbow lost her temper. “Pinkie, that is IT. Your Pinkie Sense is broken. Everything that’s happened and your knee is going off now? What could possibly be scarier than that thing in the sky, and all those tree things, and whatever Herald did to the Princesses?”
The holes in the air clenched. Then flashed so brightly the plants around them burst into flame. Something moved in the brightness, something pushing out, disorting the shapes in the air. Fluttershy had watched a stick-insect molt once, the limbs pressed together as it shrugged its way out and into a new and larger body. Stick-insects didn’t wear bone-white masks, perched insanely atop a tangle of impossibly long, hundred-jointed limbs.
Rainbow Dash stared up at the thing, as it pulled more limbs free of the rift. “Pinkie?”
“Yes, Dashie?”
“I owe you a cupcake.”
Applejack shoved Twilight to her feet, shouting something about the Elements. All she could hear was Luna’s voice in her mind, screaming a warning, over and over, too late, too late. Spike wouldn’t be able to stop him again. The horrors that Herald could inflict when he was playful were nothing on those that he could inflict when he was angry, and her friends had surely angered him. Doom. This was Doom. She looked around herself. One last look. Would she get to see her friends one last time before they were annihilated? They were looking back at her. Trusting, Oh so trusting, and it almost broke her heart.
So. said another voice. It has come to this. I warned you what would happen if you tried to use the Elements on me, didn’t I? The words were poison, acid poured into her mind. She closed her eyes, frozen with terror, too scared to move, or act, or think, a prey animal cowering before the most lethal predator of prehistory. Meat. A mindless beast.
Something touched her shoulder. She wailed, imagining it one of Herald’s limbs reaching down to unspool the flesh from her bones. But it was a hoof, and she heard Fluttershy’s voice in her ear. “Don’t be scared, Twilight.”
“Yeah, Twi. We’re always here for you.”
“Ain’t that the truth, sugarcube.”
She opened her eyes, stared to her left, Rarity smiling, prepared to risk her life to save the fillies’ souls, prepared to give anything to save her friends and her race. And Pinkie, irrepressible, bouncing back even after the Herald’s attempts to break her. She gasped, inhaled, lungs burning as she breathed in, and looked up into Herald’s fractured mask. What was there to be afraid of, that it hadn’t already shown her? And if he killed them, what of that? She couldn’t think of a better end, a better way to die, than alongside her friends, defending her people and her world, even at such a cost, even if they failed.
Her Element BLAZED.
***
Across Canterlot, ponies were lured from their hiding places by the light. The rainbow brilliance, filling every corner of the city, spreading out across the valley, reflected off every lake and river and pond, redoubled and redoubled again as the ponies looked to its source and saw the nova-brightness at its heart, brighter than the Sun but somehow safe to set their eyes upon.
There was another shape there, briefly. One that twisted in the light for a moment, before it was burned away and forgotten like a painful dream.
After that, the return of the Sisters, and the return of Time and Sunlight, was almost an anticlimax.