(Prologue note: For the short version of what's happened, read Chapter 21 of Memories of the Stone at this link. - The Author)
It is a night of great turmoil in the Equestrian world.
The Sun lies senseless upon a mountain, wounded and helpless.
The Moon guides the blind and torn in tears.
Love has failed in the face of the wounds of war and intolerance.
And Friendship?
Friendship, even if the Sun and Moon and Love should fail or fall from the skies?
Friendship is magic.
---
Princess Luna blinked away the grit of a weary trek from her eyes. Only a few steps remained until her band of wounded refugees would be safe under the aegis of the Royal Guard, pacing the Friendship Express as the train chugged it's way down the tracks. Ahead of it, four smaller engines, each towing car after car filled with ponies struggled to drag them down the line to civilization- but move they did. The Express fared better, it's modern coal-fired belly filled and puffing white smoke contentedly from the stack. Though as loaded as the rest, it bore no extra cars- all of which had ended up on the trains ahead of it - and the midnight blue one in the center had every comfort a Princess might desire. Like a bed. Oh, sweet mercy, a bed! Though every room in the Royal Car otherwise had been stuffed with fleeing ponies on the Night Court's orders, that one bed, that one divine and fluffy bed was hers.
In the skies, something whistled almost inaudibly. as it fell from above. With a *clank*, it hit the edge of the smokestack, rolled around the rim, and fell into the furnace below to land in the pile of burning stone.
The night-black bit of crystal reacted poorly to it's new home at first- a mote of darkness within darkness that swelled angrily , rattling the coal flume and sending a burp of brimstone to cloud the stream of smoke as it drifted back into the snowy wastes. Then....then it tasted the dreams as a bit of it's essence glided through the exhaust, twisting through one row of passengers after another. Ponies in fitful dreams of the horrors that had torn the Empire apart, friend from friend, life from life, mother from child, loss.....loss...loss...a bitter meal compared to the dreams of happy times that had fed it for millennia.
Carried by the winds, the tenuous strand found itself pulled back along the track, to a station that no longer had any connection to the living. The end of the line, now the End. Only the echo of the original station remained, a spectral image of the one that had been reduced to nothingness by the Heart's explosive release. So, too did the trail of dreams end here, as the ghostly forms of thousands of lost souls stood in their lines, waiting for a train that could never find the dead or ferry them to the hearts of the living.
A legion of souls, torn from their home like the mote had. They needed to go home, a guide that could bring them together in dreams- happier dreams. The souls waited for a train. A "train" was what the mote had landed in. The mote knew dreams. One could even say the mote WAS dreams. The mote was a train. The mote would BECOME a train of dreams.
Inside the engine of the Friendship Express, the fires began to belch a thick, sulfur-laden cloud. The noxious fumes rapidly drove the engineer and his crew out of the cabin as they bailed, eyes streaming with tears. The sooty pall shrouded first one car, then another, and another...until the fires had left even the caboose hidden between a thick blanket of smoke.
The whistle sang, with no hand to pull it. One might have made out a horned head from the blackened cloud at the front, looking over it's the length of it's "tail" as it finally curled around the last bit of the train. Luna watched, unsure as crew members from the other trains charged in with buckets of snow poised to quench the fire that must surely be devouring the engine compartment by the second.
The smoke....turned white, and puffed out to fill the space with a misty haze. The sulfur stench became the kinder smell of woodsmoke. With a thought, the princess summoned a breeze to clear the air.
Hundreds of ponies lay covering the tracks crew and passenger, firepony and guardpony, fast asleep. Nothing would wake even a one for over an hour, but every single one did awake- and many spoke of the ones they had left behind, who had told them not to worry, that even though they were gone- they would always ride through their dreams, where a friend kept them safe until the time where they would meet again- whenever their special somepony rested their heads. Tears were shed, but the tears lightened burdens instead of forging chains of sorrow. Luna did not sleep- but found her bed was in better hooves.
Of the train, there was no sign.
Above them, the moon shimmered and it's color began to change...
---
A second fragment flew further, the occasional bit of rainbow light dwindling below it's trail. Ahead, the Everfree Forest grew larger and more mysterious by the moment. The trees waved in an unseen wind, welcoming the shard into their midst.
It passed, unimpeded by branch or leaf to skip along a moonlit pond in the heart of the forest. A few long-eroded blocks of rock marked the pond as pony-made, but no other civilized sign appeared as the shard sank into the waters.
Silence returned after the brief splash. A pack of timberwolves dipped their jaws into the pure woodland fount to drink, the full moon reflected in the still rippling surface....and the surface broke to reveal a head, formed from sunken logs and pond moss. Ferns from the shore spotted it's wooden hide, and it waded out of the water towards the beasts.
Towering above the pack, the gargantuan timberwolf howled towards the moon, baying notes of hunt and stalk and eat and prey! in the language of those who hunt by night. A glittering chunk of feldspar formed one eye, while the other held naught but the knot of a stump, blind and scarred.
The pack obeyed with a feral joy, and that night, they feasted on a manticore- hamstrung by the pack as their new alpha strangled it with his driftwood jaws.
Truly, it was good to be home.
---
"Golden Chariot is DOWN! Repeat, Golden Chariot is DOWN!"
The night sky above Hollow Shades was filled with pegasi, furiously running bombing sorties as quickly as they could dump a wing full of spears into the nearest fell beast, land to reload, and take off to do it again. Breezy Spring and Dawn Trotter were part of the 34th Cloudsdale Air Patrol (the "Cool Shades", if you happened to be in the know), and had just gotten the word from the ground crew that Celestia had flamed out over the Appleachians, location mostly unknown as the Princess had flapped in up to Her Royal Hindquarters so far that the rest of the defenders hadn't been able to catch up.
New orders, courtesy of the ground crew relay. Get in the area. Find the Princess. Save the Princess. Call in the medical chariot with a flare, and get HRH out of hock, by the previous hour if they could manage it. It was almost supposed to be daylight and nobody could find anyone -else- to raise the sun, right?
Swap the spear clips for medical kits and industrial-sized sugar cubes. Preen everything -perfect-. Wait for the groundhoofer to wave them out on the trotway, and....
*FOOOM*
Building up lift as they galloped, Breezy and Dawn caught the updraft at the end of the road and lit up their burners, twin golden contrails leaving a brilliant afterimage as the CAP wing went full out. A bat big enough to blot out the moon dove on the pegasi, intend on making a meal out of the two bugs lifting off for the boonies.
The groundpounders' ballista bolt tore a hole through one membranous wing and sent the monster tumbling towards the trotway, Guards lined up another volley on the thrashing beast and pumped the second round through it's skull, putting the night terror down for the count.
Nearly devoured by something out of a two-thousand year old legend. Just another day, right?
"Hey, Dawn? We got smoke.". Breezy looked down to see something huge and feathery self-barbequing in the valley below, but it wasn't equine.
"Negative, that's not Chariot."
"Can YOU think of anything that would drop that kind of heat?"
"Dragonfire."
"You see any dragons?"
"Negative."
"Then Golden Char-Celestiaclopit! had to be near here. WE didn't start the fire. Look around!"
Dawn Trotter cut the burners and winged over to circle the smouldering avian wreckage, Breezy lining up to keep an eye on her six...
....just in time to see Celestia's hooves as something dragged her off the edge of a cliff and into the mountain.
"SUCK A CYCLONE! ONE OF THEM MONSTERS IS GONNA EAT CELESTIA!", spat Breezy.
The pegasi pair dove nose to tail for the narrow ledge, letting their legs absorb most of the braking as they confronted two small, white beasts that had laid their paws on the ruler of Equestria. Small bat wings sprouting from their backs, the fiends fluttered away from their prey, a small orange ball waving back and forth between two catlike ears.
"Filthy meat-eating predators!", snarled Dawn as his spear lined up to shish-ke-bob one of the beasts.
"You're DEAD....dead whatever you are, you Tartarus fiend!", followed Breezy. Nothing two pegasi couldn't save a princess over, it'd be done in two swings!
A pair of cast-iron frypans neatly brained the winged heroes as they lunged forward. One swing each.
...
Some time later, Breezy and Dawn woke up, trussed like turkeys and stripped down to their pinfeathers.
Dawn focused on the roaring fire in front of him and started crying. Something was bubbling in a pot over the fire, and it smelled like....mushroom gravy!
"I DON'T WANNA BE MONSTER CHOW! BAWWWWWWWW!"
A distinctly royal sigh followed the outburst. Princess Celestia's head came into view, giving Dawn a clear view of Her Majesty's profile. Straight off the two-bit coin.
"You are not being made into dinner, but if you can behave, you're welcome to some."
Dawn Trotter checked herself for signs of a concussion. You did not get invited to dinner by Princess Celestia. In a cave. With monsters. It just didn't happen.
"My friends thought I was being attacked by monsters, and when you tried to attack them too...well, it's a good thing you had those medical kits! Now, lower your voice. They don't understand Equestrian yet, but anypony knows someone screaming at them with spears is up to no good.". The Princess explained this to Dawn with the tone used by most teachers trying to explain algebra to the stallion who got in on a hoofball scholarship.
This had to be head trauma for sure, she thought.
Breezy proceeded to show why he was bright enough to be wing leader by saying:
"Um, your Highness? What do you CALL them things?"
"They are not THINGS, any more than a griffin would be. The two white ones are called "Moogle", and the other two...
A masked, floppy-eared humanoid poked it's head into Dawn's view and waved tenatively. Two dark lenses shielded it's eyes from view, and a thick outfit of cloth and leather shielded the rest from...the sun, perhaps? It was a fiend from Tartarus, after all.
"....are called "Goblins". This is Maguffnox, and her companion is Macgyvix. Kupofrieda and Kupollux are still rather scared of you, so we've all agreed to keep things wrapped up until we're all sure you're ready to be nice."
"Y-y-your Highness?", babbled Dawn.
"Yes, my little pony?"
"If they can't speak, how do you know they're not monsters?"
"Oh, it turned out we had a common language after all.", said Celestia with a twinkle in her eye.
Two moogles, two goblins and one alicorn held up a steaming cup of tea at the same time.
One large pot of mushroom stew and two cups of tea later, Breezy and Dawn found themselves standing by their Princess as she looked out over the valley from the edge of the cliff. Celestia, her hindfoot swathed in bandages stood looking to the east with a practiced eye.
"It isn't Canterlot's balcony, but I think we can rough it.", she said.
Golden lights shimmered across her horn. The moon drifted into below the horizon to the Celestial call, and the solar disk rose to fill the once-dark land with a new dawn.