//------------------------------// // Effulgence // Story: Speak Not Of The End Of The World // by Shaslan //------------------------------// What, and then she just vanished? Cherry Berry sounded sceptical. <> Laotyn shivered. <> Weird. <> No. She frowned; he was learning to read the expressions of what he now knew was a face, and not merely another limb. Weird that I’m dreaming about Princess Luna’s disappearance and tying it to you. She’s missed a couple of parties and the gossip magazines are going crazy over it, but I don’t care about that stuff. She huffed. Then again, I have recurring dreams and what I guess is an imaginary friend, so what do I know about crazy? <> Laotyn said wearily; it was a stock phrase by this point, and neither of them found it meaningful any longer. Well, whatever. Cherry Berry flipped her mane dismissively. I’ve got a big flight in a couple of days, and if you’re not imaginary I wish you’d actually let me get some sleep instead of bothering me. Laotyn’s hue shifted a shade darker. What could he say to convince her — and even if he could, would it even matter? Luna’s display of aggression had been horrifying, and the Council’s mind was all but made up. The hope of peace was dwindling, and no one but him even seemed to care that Issia’s planet was already occupied. <> It wasn’t the first time he had made the request, and the scoff she gave him was also a well-worn one. Yeah, that’d go well, wouldn’t it? A balloon pilot rocking up at the palace in Canterlot and demanding to see Princess Celestia on the grounds that the talking jellyfish in her dreams told her to. She didn’t understand. Even now, she still couldn’t grasp that he was real. <> Frustration was tingeing his words with ocher, and Cherry Berry cut him off with a wave of her foreleg. Laotyn, come on. Give it a rest. You’re ruining a perfectly good flying dream. She pulled a rope on her balloon, releasing another gout of flame. Laotyn had finally learned not to flinch at the sight of it, but he still kept a safe distance. He was turning his next remonstrance over in his mind, trying to find the right words, when Lyia hurled herself bodily against the door to his pod. <> Abruptly pulling himself out of the dream, he turned to her, bewildered. <> <> Object? What object? Laotyn shoved his tendrils back into the receptors and steered frantically away from Cherry Berry’s dream. Was it Luna, making good on her threat? What was she sending towards them? He hadn’t known that the ponies even possessed the technology for ships. They didn’t even know how to grow algae in shapes, for goodness sake! How could they suddenly have developed the ability to engineer all the varieties necessary for air filtration, vacuum protection, and all the thousand other requirements? Moving frantically, he reeled his consciousness back in, casting about the Taelo for whatever was threatening it — —And then he saw it. A blazing arc of light, like a meteor or a comet, the tail that streaked behind it showing that it clearly had come from the planet. A ship, or something else? There wasn’t time to consider it — everything was swept away in the horror that this thing, whatever it was, was burning, and it was headed straight for the most flammable object in Issia’s entire solar system. He zoomed in, as close as he dared, though he felt the heat scorching him even through the receptors. It was no ship. The fiery core of the meteor, white hot and pulsing with anger, was a pony. And he knew this pony. He had seen her often enough in Cherry Berry’s memories, and the dreams of all the other ponies who worshipped her. Laotyn flew so quickly through the corridors that he hardly saw them whiz past. He expended air rashly, quickly, not caring what it cost so long as he reached her, so long as he put himself between her and his people, so long as he could save — he hardly knew who he wanted to save. He wanted to save them all. When he came skidding to a halt in the lower agricultural deck, he saw her. Already though the wall, facing down a crowd of farmers and frightened civilians who clustered together at the sphere’s far edge. The old flocking instinct returning in full force when danger threatened. It was just as he had thought. One of their princesses. Celestia. Laotyn stopped for a moment to observe her. Of all the ponies he had seen in Cherry Berry’s dreams or in their own, Celestia was the one most beautiful to his own perception. Her limbs and bones were as unpleasant as all the rest of them, but the filaments that grew on the top and rear of her body were not the same flat limp things as Cherry Berry had. Celestia’s mane and tail wavered like his own tendrils, and shone with soft pastel colours just like a person’s body. When seen from the right angle, she looked almost like a person herself. But now, stood knee-deep in the algae pool at the sphere’s base as the wall behind her tried to reseal itself, Celestia looked anything but beautiful. The more time he spent with Cherry Berry, the more Laotyn learned about what was normal for a pony, and Celestia did not look normal. Her eyes were wild and staring, her pretty mane was tangled, and there was blood dripping from one of her nostrils. If this creature had been a person, her skin would have been flashing red, red, red, terror and anger combined. “You killed her,” she moaned, and as the other people nearby flashed red and white in their distress and pain at the terrible, foreign vibrations, Laotyn tried to focus on the deep undercurrent of purple-black loss beneath her words. There was so much pain flowing all around him. His own, his people’s, the pony’s. “Murderers,” she gasped out, and Laotyn almost wished that he had not learned the language. She was accusing them of the crime they had not yet committed. They would become murderers when they took Equus and wiped out the species living there. “You’re all murderers, and you killed her, my sister — I only just got her back.” Finally dragging himself out of his shock and his stupor, Laotyn dragged himself towards the monster in the algae pools. He wasn’t qualified, he wasn’t ready — but he was the closest to an ambassador his people had, and the fate of a species, his friend’s species, depended on him getting relations back on track. <> he said, not certain if ponies would be able to understand him outside of dreams. <> She looked at him with blank incomprehension, and then the expression on her face twisted into revulsion. The very same expression Cherry Berry wore when she talked about slugs, or brussel sprouts. Laotyn’s conception of both those things was hazy, but he knew enough to be wounded. He was not a slug, or a brussel sprout, so why was she looking at him that way? “Wrong,” she croaked, and even though the volume was lesser it still hurt. “All wrong. Have to stop you. Have to…end this.” Then her horn lit up, the same way he had seen Luna’s do once before. <> he cried, but she paid him no heed. “Mother,” she called, looking at no one at all, “Great Faust, I — I’ve asked too much today, but give me just a little more strength. Let me do this. Let me save them before I come to join you and Luna.” <> Laotyn pleaded. <> But her horn blazed yellow, and behind him, the crowd pulsed white in sheer terror. <> <> <> The fear in the room was stifling, he could taste it, and it was suddenly warmer than it had ever been before. The walls of the Taelo were blazing with light, and even though it was impossible, though Laotyn knew that no lone creature could move a sun, icy dread took hold of the very deepest parts of his core. No creature ought to be able to fly alone and unaided through the glacial inferno of the void, either, and yet this pony princess had done it. <> he said again, weakly. He knew she could not understand him. <> It was hot. Too hot. His fragile skin was beginning to crackle. “Luna,” said Celestia, hope making her voice raw. “Luna, I’m coming.” Luna. Laotyn remembered how Luna had screamed when she felt his memories. Cherry Berry said ponies screamed when they were frightened or in pain — just like the people all around him were now. If he could make Celestia feel like that too, then maybe she would stop. Maybe she would think. <> he repeated, with more conviction. And then, loading his words with all the hopelessness of his situation, with the same memories of Home that had halted Luna, he compressed them all down into one neutron-heavy word and shot it into Celestia with all the strength he had left. <> She staggered. He saw it, and so did everyone else in the chamber. The light of her horn flickered, and for just a moment the heat did not increase. <> shouted someone else, and <> called a third. Then more and more voices took up the cry, memories flying with wild abandon, and Celestia was stumbling, falling to her knees, splashing in the water like a dying thing. <> Laotyn said, so softly that no one but himself could hear. <> And I hurt Luna, too. <> he said, realisation dawning — the loss and the madness in her expression — but it was too late. People were crowding so closely around Celestia that she was hardly visible beneath the pulsating, multi-coloured mass. And they were all shouting, all screaming down at her. The barrage was too much, and by the time Laotyn had struggled through the throng to get to her, she was lying face-down in the shallow water, her pretty hair floating limp on the surface, stilled forever.