"Step within, or the others die!" Celestia's voice boomed out from the glowing sphere, so loud that several crewmen dropped to their knees. A few kept firing their strange weapons into its surface, without effect. They might be more than a match for the royal guard, but this was the Alicorn herself. Her power was so great that it could not be easily confined.
"Wake up," whispered a voice in her ear, literally. It was Pixie, perched on her shoulder and overcome with fear. Rarely had she heard the little creature so terrified. She was plainly afraid now, more than Mira had ever heard from the little feline. "We can't help them anymore!"
Beside her, Captain Yi's body lay pierced with his own sword—mighty champion of the ancient bats gone with little apparent effort on Celestia's part. How could Mira possibly hope to compare? If she stood against the Alicorn, she would die too.
Kallisto cowered behind a twisted metal beam. Behind her, Meridian peeked out from inside the ship. If she did nothing, they would both die. Wherever Sandy was hiding, they would soon follow.
Mira stepped out into the open. She braced herself for the bolt of lightning that would kill her like some other members of the crew—it did not come. She wasn't being baited to expose herself to attack. Or rather—if she was, it was a far deadlier kind.
"She can do worse than wake you up! Mira, listen!" The kitten hopped down off her shoulder to the ground, spinning to glare up at her. Maybe it was wrong to think of Pixie as just a kitten anymore—after months together, she was twice the size she had been when they met. Her splotchy fur had grown in different patterns by now.
If she knew anything about the way of cats, she had lived more of her life with Mira than the time she spent before. Her perspective was worth considering.
"Your dream-self is a conduit to the real one. Powerful magic could reach through this world to touch that one. Otherwise, why not just kill you? She already could. She could right now, and she doesn't. She wants something more."
"I have given you long enough to decide!" boomed the voice from the vortex. The sun overhead grew brighter, searing white in its intensity. It could easily burn them all away, leaving nothing behind. Maybe it would.
But not if Mira chose right now. "I do that, and they live?" Mira shouted. Her voice couldn't carry nearly as far, she just didn't have the strength. But she shouted anyway. "You swear?"
There was a brief pause, hesitation only seconds long. Then came the reply. "I swear. Come within and speak. They will not die."
"But you might!" Pixie whispered. "Turn around, bat! Wake up now! I know you can!"
She could—but the kitten couldn't force her.
"Remember when we met?" she whispered, voice low. "You said you followed me because I had vision. I have one now, Pixie. I can't let these ponies die." Before the kitten could stop her—before she could even react—Mira stepped forward, through the vortex on the deck.
The terrible magical force within tore at her, threatening to throw her back. But it wasn't meant as an attack either, at least not directly. She only had to grit her teeth together, focus on her steps, and she was through.
The deck of the Diaspora did not wait on the other side, broken or otherwise. Instead, she was somewhere else. A grassy field under the full moon, with the sky stained blood red. And waiting within, resting on her haunches as though she had come out here to stargaze, was Princess Celestia.
Or something very like her, anyway. The pony was made of glittering crystal instead of flesh, carved so perfectly she might have mistaken her for the real thing. Except for the way the light struck against her coat, which reflected more like glass.
Mira had spent a lifetime hearing about this mare. She had seen her cutie mark on every coin she ever spent, seen her portraits in every state building, heard her name on the lips of every Equestrian. She was their hero, the hero who banished her evil sister and showed the truth of thestrals’ nature to the eyes of every Equestrian.
But for Mira and the others like her, that didn't make her a hero. It meant she was their greatest enemy to ever live.
"I wondered what you would be like," she said. She wasn't shouting anymore. The sound of battle did not reach inside here—nor was there any easy way to see where they had come from. A slight shimmer remained in the air behind her, the only suggestion that the field she was standing in did not continue forever. But if she tried to flee now, Mira did not expect to reach it.
"I imagined you must look like she did, at the end. Corrupted by Nightmare, mind twisted beyond recognition. It would be the merciful thing to kill you here. But you are not what I imagined."
The mare did not look in her direction. She kept her eyes fixed on the sky, entirely unafraid of Mira. There was nothing stopping her from mounting whatever kind of dream-attack she wished, yet Celestia didn't care.
She knew the difference in power between them. She knew what such a fight would mean. Mira had no such qualms or hesitation to prevent her from attacking, except for the obvious. She was not going to throw her life into a blender. She was the last hope for freeing her princess—the last hope for thestrals all across Equestria. She had to live, too.
"I'm not crazy," she said, forcing herself to sound calm despite the death and mayhem she had just come from. For the sake of those who died, she had to get through this. "I'm not corrupt. I'm fighting for a good cause. Your government is trying to wipe out my tribe. I'm fighting for them just like our princess used to, before you banished her."
She stopped several paces away from the Alicorn, as though that would make a difference. She kept her wings open too, ready to take off if she had to. But there was nowhere she could fly to faster than unicorn magic could reach and kill her. If Celestia decided to do that, well... she would be dead.
"I see this is the case." The Alicorn flicked her mane, and somehow the stone moved as flexibly as real hair. Another impossibly, yet it was plain before her eyes. "You unite the ancient ones among your kind. I hear whispers of a city where the old magic has returned. This must be your doing."
It wasn't a question. Mira should deflect—but somehow, she knew this unicorn would read her lie just as easily. There was no point in trying. "Only what we must to survive. I don't want to fight you or Equestria. But we're struggling to survive, princess. Every winter we lose more good ponies. Fewer and fewer foals are born every year. And whenever we listen, we hear of other villages scattered and broken by your army. Equestria is trying to wipe us out. Do you deny it?"
The princess stood up and turned on her. She was twice Mira's height; larger than the biggest stallion she had ever seen. Yet that size was not crude muscle—she was lean and powerful, and radiated that strength in a way that no simply tall pony ever could. "I don't. The peaceful extinction of your race has been my aim since Luna's banishment. But have you stopped to wonder why? Did you ever once think that the Alicorn that was ancient beyond your imagination might have a good reason for what she was doing? My servants may be driven by simple cruelty, by fear of what is different, by prejudice and hatred. I am not. I do not hate you, bat. I don't hate any of you."
Mira felt the conviction behind her words as she said it, as clearly as she had heard anything from the Alicorn.
It would be so much better if Celestia had started screaming and ranting about how she was evil and needed to die. At least that way she would have an enemy to fight. But the princess wouldn't even give her that.
"But you just said you're trying to kill us. Why should it matter what your reasons are?" Mira stood as firmly as she could, though she felt smaller and weaker than a filly by comparison. At least most of the ponies she fought couldn't blast her to nothing with a wave of irresistible magical force. "There's no reason good enough for genocide, princess. It's the worst evil there is—we have to fight against it no matter how hopeless."
"My sister was kinder than I." The mare turned away from her, as though she was barely even listening anymore. "Long ago, when your ancestors reached the dreams of sleeping Equestrians, begging for help. She was the one who heard them, the one whose word allowed them into our world. If it wasn't for her, you would have been born an ordinary pony—you all would. There would be no existential threat. There would be no need for this path.
"But I have endeavored to make it merciful. My troops have not hunted down the living. I use an economic strategy—one that will whittle down your population over many generations, while suppressing your ability to do harm. I wish no pain for you, bat. I would not do even this if there was another way."
The princess stood over her, speaking so calmly about what was plainly an intentional, deliberate strategy to wipe out her entire species. She didn't say it without remorse—her ears were flat, her tail hung low, and her voice was tortured.
"You could stop. I can see you don't want to do this, so just—don't! Stop trying to kill us! We wouldn't have to fight back if you didn't make it the only choice. Everything I do is only to guarantee that bats have a future. There are other ways we could have this promise. You just have to stop trying to kill us."
"If there was another choice." Celestia strode past her, through the tall grass. Mira had taken it to be an empty field at first, but she was wrong. There were lumps in the darkness around them. Maybe they had always been there, or maybe Princess Celestia had summoned them into being with dreamcraft.
Her bat eyes cut through the gloom and saw them easily. They were bodies. Corpses in heavy metal armor, their flesh long since rotten to leave only a few bones and the rusting metal to suggest where they had been.
"You are not just a pony. You carry the blood of another place in your veins, another nature. The power of dreamcraft comes from that far shore. It instills in each of you the seed of Equestria's entire destruction. My sister showed the truth of my fear, the inevitable consequence of forays to a realm no sane mind was meant to go. She brought the Nightmare back with her and was destroyed by it. You could do the same. Every bat you're training in that hidden city of yours—she could do the same."
The grass withered at her words, leaving only bleached and blackened earth. Overturned siege engines were overcome with thorny brambles, while thousands of bones surrounded them on both sides. A castle stood nearby, its roof collapsed and many of its towers fallen. This was the old capital, the last site of the siege in the failed Lunar Rebellion. Princess Celestia's memories.
Mira advanced on her—as brave as the princess who had called her to service. As brave as Kallisto said her parents had once been, when they gave their lives in service to the moon. Getting closer to her was like advancing into a hurricane.
"I don't know what the Nightmare is, princess. I'm not going to summon anything, and I don't want to hurt your kingdom. I just want a future for my kind. We won't accept our death as some just punishment for crimes we never committed, or evil you say is latent in our bloodline. Evil is a choice. It's a choice you make when you kill innocent creatures, whether or not those creatures are bats."
Celestia wasn't fighting her. Impossibly, those were tears on her face. She knew Mira was telling the truth. "I had to banish my own sister! I don't want any of this, bat rebel! It would be kinder if we had never taken your ancestors into our lands. We thought you were like us—thought we could live together. And we did. We overcame our differences, there were centuries of peace. But beyond the veil of sleep, on the outermost abysses of the Dreaming, the fabric of our reality is undone. Whispers of unmade things speak to dreamers like you, and some of you listen. If even one in a billion has a crack in your soul wide enough for them to seize—if my sister could fall, anypony could. This is necessary."
"So is this," Mira said, very quietly. Then she struck, summoning the dream-magic she had been preparing during their entire conversation. A crystal body was a beautiful thing, protecting the princess from harm—but glass, even crystal glass, had one weakness.
She struck against it with a hammer made from shadow, willing it to swing far faster than the strongest stallion. She moved it so fast a shockwave rippled along her fur, and a crack of sound deafened her.
That was nothing compared to the terrible blow as it met the princess's crystal avatar. A single crack, then thousands, then—she vanished, in a wail of pain and frustration.
The vision crumbled around Mira, ancient battlefield and corpses and moon in the sky. She swayed, then toppled onto the broken deck of the Diaspora. A hammer landed on the floor beside her, metal so heavy it dented the steel. Mira swayed from the force, then collapsed into merciful unconsciousness.