Confidence was forgotten in a second as he gasped in a breath too quick for his body to properly react. His chest ached as his lungs stuttered in a cough that he forced into a peter to instead stare wide-eyed at the figure he'd forgotten was so tall. Tall enough to eclipse him by entire heads as length upon length of limb revealed themselves to stalk quickly toward him.
He felt like he should run. He couldn't bring himself to run.
He stood dumbstruck and panicking more than his gaping face would ever convey as the black expanse of a figure that was Nightmare Moon stopped to a halt just in front of him. She was so large, so predominantly dominating of one monotone color that all he could see was endless fields of black tar parted by centric streams of silver all the way up to two cyan eyes that sat so calm.
////////// Bridge //////////
They'd been lame, and glassy. Lost far in the past like the mare a thousand years displaced in time She was. Now they were sharp. Urgent. They focused on his own stare so perfectly that he could swear for a moment that he was staring up into a mirror. Except a mirror would never reach forward and take rough hold of his withers and pull him closer. Would never lean forward with sharp scentless breaths to stop close to his face so all he could hear was its whispers.
"Listen to me, Light. Listen and never forget. In your entire life you might never hear words more important." Her voice was quick and quiet and filled with paranoia as if She was afraid somepony might steal Her words away if they were too slow.
He was having a panic attack. It was so so clear to see in every rushing thought that slipped through his grasp to twirl into outrageous conclusions that he never would have considered otherwise. It was simple to realize. It should have been simple to stop. All he had to do now that he'd identified the problem was use his superior sense of logic to debunk the baseless, unconstrained fear. The easiest pen put to paper there had ever been.
But he couldn't as long as She was still there. Holding him and squeezing him and just there.
Her voice came again; battering his ears with harshly driven rhetoric that was clear even through a creeping sink into muffled stillness. "In this world there exists a force greater than any countable number of ponies. Greater than I or my sister or even our sum. A force to move the Gods themselves. An incontrovertible force beyond any constraining definition or explanation.
"It is not destiny. It is no prophecy. They are small in comparison. To name it even now would do little but belie its strength to a degree bordering on heresy. It is arbitrating; and when that is said: it is said that there is no higher authority."
Her eyes. Boring into his without mercy yet barely seeing him for it. Not moving or shaking or jerking but full of wild energy held so still like a blade kept at the waist.
It was fear. Nightmare Moon was afraid.
"It would never matter enough to give you its name, you would never understand its importance. Its weight. What you can and should understand is that it opposes me. It would find any conceivable way to sway events in favors opposing me or mine, to the extent of tortures that the darkest scum in all of history would have gagged to imagine.
"It accepts only what it believes is correct, and to its standards, I am not. It holds that which I would attempt to achieve in gross contempt, and it has decreed that I must fail."
Everything about Her screamed insanity except for Her eyes. Her words were unbelievable nonsense spewed like street gospel and libel; yet still: sanity burned like a torch in the wide scope of Her eyes. It was impossible; Her entire tirade was inconceivably outlandish and he did not believe it for a single second.
But She did.
"You asked why I could not simply kill the heroes. I could. I could do that and so much more but it would never matter. Never be enough. It would find new ways. New methods. New powers never recorded. It would and could and already has invented completely new heroes in their places and it would turn out that they were always the ones 'meant' to have been there. It lacks reason and it lacks sense but it has so much power."
It was gone. In an instant; like the sharp snap of a cord tied too tight. The spark of reason, of lucidity. In a single moment it was entirely snuffed.
In its place was a raging monster that stretched its mouth in a cavernous grin and laughed. Shrilly. Breathless. Like the howl of a banshee. Like a demon.
"Can't you see, yet? Can't you?! This is why I need you, Light Flow; this is your destiny!"
He wanted to cry. To scream that he didn't understand She wasn't making any sense. He couldn't.
She was holding him too hard.
""
///probably cut this