“Hugo, stop this ship!” Kailani yelled. “Wait, Imara, no-”
Imara was already diving over the railing, her wings spread and a determined look on her face as she flew as hard as she could towards the city. She snatched up a young unicorn foal who was sitting on the sidewalk, crying, as a shadow wolf stalked closer to him. Imara carried the foal up out of harm’s way and circled back to help more ponies.
“Do we have a plan?” Lukas asked nervously, wringing his hooves. “At all? What are we supposed to do?”
“I don’t know!” Flurry spread her wings and observed the scene below her. “I don’t know if there’s anything we can do-”
She stopped, her attention suddenly brought to the palace perched on the top of the mountain, to the golden towers and spires and banners blowing in the breeze. A memory came to her, and she gasped, an idea forming in her head.
“Bring everypony to the palace!” Flurry told her friends. “We can stake it out there!”
“But how do we get down there?” Lukas called up to her.
Flurry lit up her horn, and in a burst of sunshiney golden light, all of them disappeared and reappeared on the ground just below the zeppelin.
“Just get as many ponies as possible up to the castle, and we’ll figure out the rest from there!” Flurry told them before she flew off after Imara.
Hugo, Kailani, Lukas, Brooks, Ash, Little Braveheart, and Midnight looked at each other, all wearing matching expressions of confusion. Little Braveheart suddenly whooped, turned tail, and ran, chasing after shadow wolves and yelling at them to make them back off. She didn’t seem to be scaring them, but she was scaring the ponies plenty.
“Maybe we should not do that,” Midnight suggested.
“Okay,” Ash said, taking a deep breath and swallowing her fear. “Kailani, you’re with me. We’ll save as many ponies as possible from the city. Brooks, you cover our route to the palace. Maybe your fire will be of some use against the wolves. Midnight, Hugo, Lukas, do you think you can do crowd control?”
Midnight nodded, but his eyes were wide with fear. Lukas and Hugo looked nervous as well, but they all turned and dashed through the streets toward the castle. Brooks chased after him, little tongues of fire curling off his horn as his emotions ran high. A wolf suddenly jumped out in front of them and howled, and Brooks leaped in front of his friends, fire raging around him as he turned into a nirik. His eyes turned pure white with fire flickering around them, and he roared at the wolf, shooting fire at it from his pronged horn. The wolf ducked and backed away, a growl low in its throat.
“Go!” Brooks shouted at the three others behind him. “I’ll catch up to you!”
The yak, griffon, and Crystal pony dashed into the elevator that led up to the castle and hurried inside, Hugo pressing the up button so fast and hard that he worried it might break. When the doors finally shut and they began to ascend above the clouds, Midnight looked out the window and felt his heart stop.
“Woah…”
There were even more shadow wolves than they had thought. More were creeping out of alleys all the time and pouncing on innocent ponies, wrapping them in ropes of shadow and dragging them inside the fathomless depths.
Hugo and Lukas joined him at the window. “Holy stars…” Hugo muttered under his breath. “How did this happen?”
Lukas pushed his bangs out of his eyes so that he could get a better view. “And how are we supposed to help them?”
The elevator suddenly shuddered and came to a screeching halt, the lights flickering off as the floor shuddered beneath their feet. All three creatures screamed and looked around wildly as something heavy thumped on the ceiling, denting it inwards. The creatures screamed again and pressed themselves against the doors of the elevator as something forced its way in.
A hunk of metal was ripped off of the roof of the elevator, and a wolf poked its snout in, snapping and baring its teeth.
If they had screamed loudly before, they screamed even louder now. The wolf suddenly dissolved and slipped into the elevator, pooling around their hooves and trapping them in place. All three of them could feel their consciousness slipping away, could feel the wolf’s power infecting their minds, and knew that they were powerless to stop it-
A shadow suddenly fell over the hole in the ceiling, and a pony poked their head through the gash. The pony had a blue-gray coat like a stormy sky and wore a silver guard’s helmet. Zoom Zephyrwing reached inside and offered her hoof to Midnight.
“Grab on!”
Midnight’s eyes cleared, and he struggled to release one of his hooves. When it finally came free, he grabbed Zoom’s hoof desperately as she strained to pull him free. She finally hoisted him through the hole, the jagged metal scraping at his coat, but he didn’t care. The wind whipped his mane as he scrambled onto the roof of the elevator, and saw just how perilously far away the ground was. Midnight swallowed and pressed himself as far back against the cliff wall as he could.
Zoom was hauling up Lukas, and struggling a bit. Midnight wanted to help her, but he couldn’t seem to get his hooves to work. Another pegasus, this one green, also wearing the uniform of a royal guard, swooped down to help. Together, Zoom and Thunder managed to pull the yak through the hole in the roof, and he collapsed onto the top of the elevator, heaving relieved breaths.
“Hugo!” Midnight shouted, scrambling to the opening and looking down. The flightless griffon was standing still, staring off into the distance as if he could see something that the rest of them couldn’t, not moving. “Hugo, grab on!” Midnight extended his hoof out to his friend, but he didn’t acknowledge him.
Panic rose up in the Crystal pony’s chest, seeming to constrict his lungs and making it impossible to breathe. The darkness that covered the floor of the elevator was moving, rippling, as it slowly began to wrap itself around Hugo. Midnight stretched his hoof out farther, screaming Hugo’s name, but deep down he knew that there wasn’t going to be anything that he could do. The pendant on his necklace, made of crystal and shaped like a crescent moon, slipped into the hole, and the chain caught on the jagged edge, but Midnight barely noticed.
“Hugo!”
Lukas had noticed that their friend was missing and joined Midnight, though he didn’t see any way he could help, either. He turned in desperation to the pegasi. “Do something!”
Thunder flew around to the elevator’s window and began kicking it and throwing himself against it, but the glass wouldn’t give. Zoom was looking around for something to help break it, but she didn’t see anything that she could use.
Midnight shut his eyes tight and wished for his new magic. But that only worked when he made contact with the ground. Here he was, stranded on a cliff wall on top of a broken elevator, and there was nothing he could do to help his friend.
“Please, Hugo,” he called in a broken voice. “Please, I know you’re still in there. You can fight it!”
Still, the griffon didn’t move.
Suddenly, a brilliant glow filled Midnight’s vision, and he looked down to see the crescent moon hanging from his neck shining like a thousand stars against the night sky. The light filled the elevator below, and the shadows seemed to soften and retreat.
Hugo gasped and blinked, his expression clearing, and he looked around frantically, his eyes locking on Midnight hanging from the ceiling. He reached up a free claw and grasped Midnight’s hoof, and the Crystal pony began to pull him up.
“Help me!” Midnight said through clenched teeth, and Lukas quickly grabbed Hugo’s other claw to haul their friend up. The three of them collapsed onto the top of the elevator, the mountain wind blowing in their faces, the ground a thousand feet below them, but they barely noticed. All that mattered to them was that they were together, and that they were safe.
For now.
“We have to get up there!” Zoom yelled at them, pointing above them. The creatures looked up to see that they weren’t that far from the top of the cliff, but they were at a loss for any way to get up there. “Quickly, before that wolf wakes back up!”
“I have an idea,” Midnight said suddenly, looking at his hooves. Turning to Zoom, he called, “Can you get me up there?”
Zoom nodded, and, with a jerk of her head to Thunder, the two pegasi swooped down and picked him up, carrying him joltingly to the top of the cliff. As soon as his hooves hit solid ground, he called upon the new magic inside him to help his friends.
Glowing green light stretched out in front of him, and a crystal vine burst from the ground and twisted down to where Hugo and Lukas were waiting on the top of the broken elevator. Large leaves, each bigger than Lukas, sprouted out of the vine at regular intervals, creating a kind of staircase that led up to the top.
“Hurry!” Midnight called down to them.
The griffon and yak wasted no time scrambling from leaf to leaf, climbing up the vine until they reached the top of the cliff.
“Thanks,” Lukas told Midnight between heavy breaths. Hugo said nothing, his gaze focused on the ground, but he nodded at the Crystal pony to show his gratitude.
The creatures turned to the guards. Midnight vaguely recognized them from the last time he had been in Zephyr Heights, so long ago, and he remembered that they had helped fight the Legion of Doom in the swamps. “What’s going on here?” he asked, gesturing to the city behind them. “Where did all these wolves come from?”
Zoom and Thunder exchanged a look and shrugged. “We don’t know,” Zoom said, her voice unintentionally sharp. “A few days ago, our queen and a few other ponies mysteriously went missing. The following night, all of the guards disappeared, along with Sunny and her friends. We don’t know what happened to them, but Thunder and I somehow managed to evade them. We woke up to the city looking like this: wolves everywhere and ponies getting sucked inside by the minute.”
“How have you managed to last this long?” Lukas asked, his voice tinged with a hint of suspicion.
“Pure luck,” Zoom growled, her voice low and dangerous, but her fury wasn’t directed at them. “We know the palace well and lost the wolves that were chasing us.”
“But we don’t know how to help everypony else-” Thunder started, but he was interrupted by Ash as she flew up over the cliff, gasping for breath.
“Guys!” she called. “We… need… to get… these ponies… up… here! What… happened?”
“A wolf attacked us in the elevator,” Lukas told her. “So that’s busted, and it’d be too slow anyhow. Midnight, any way you can make some more of those vines?”
He nodded and slammed his hoof into the ground once more. Crystal vines burst out from the cliff wall by the dozens and curled down the precarious distance to the highest level of the city below, where crowds of ponies were gathering, defended on all sides by their friends.
“Thunder and I will go help,” Zoom told them tightly, and she and the green pegasus dove over the cliff and spiraled down below.
“I can help you guys up here,” Ash said timidly, landing beside them. “I’m not very fast, anyway.”
“We still need a place to go,” Lukas said, frowning as he studied the palace in front of them. “One or two ponies can easily evade the shadow wolves in there, but a whole city of them? We need a place to set up a fortress so that we can outlast them. Hugo, any ideas?”
“Huh?” The griffon looked up from where he was staring at his claws. “Oh, um… what about that abandoned air station that Flurry Heart told us about? We could hide in there, and it should be big enough…”
The other three creatures all nodded just as the first ponies came scrambling over the top of the cliff, a pack of shadow wolves right behind them.