After taking several calming breaths, I attempted to tell Nightmare Moon about myself, my people and our many troubles.
As has undoubtedly become clear by now, economy of language is not among my virtues. Were that not enough, I was further hampered by my audience's incessant questions, snide comments, and minute-by-minute updates of how much time I had remaining.
Still, I think I managed to do as best I could given the circumstances. There was time for an overview of our pre-contact history, how five agressive interstellar powers deemed my home system a vital strategic location because it was one of the few bridging the gap between the 2b and 3a arms. Each coveted it for their own, but they were unwilling to bear the cost of fighting one another directly in such a narrow spatial bottleneck. Instead, they clandestinely meddled in our affairs.
I related how the alien empires armed rebel groups to incite civil wars, bought corrupt politicians and magnates and controlled organized crime along with a hundred other little ways of breaking our spirits and seizing control of our world through subtlety. Though life had gone on, beneath the veneer, our own physical and moral weakness before these greedy, faceless powers was destroying us within as surely as any bombardment or invasion from without.
I had finished the grand overview and was just about to begin relating the history of my own great family and my personal connection to all this when she cut me off. Her outrage seemed to have cooled and she looked at me differently than before.
"Time's up, Pangolin. I'll admit, I was the tiniest bit moved by your story. It's as nothing next to my misfortunes, but then you've only been around for the narrowest sliver of my lifetime, after all.
"I can see the moral you were slowly crawling toward," she said, giving me a look of tired forbearance. "You've got it backward if you think to compare me to those foreign monsters picking your own apart. Your problem is that it's your fellow monsters are too much like my nasty, selfish, unthinking ponies. If they hadn't collaborated and sold each other out, those big star-monsters couldn't have caused near as much trouble for them." She nodded to me with the slightest flicker of sympathy in her eyes. "Of course you couldn't rid the universe of the whole lot of them as you ought, but removing yourself was the next best thing. You were right to turn your back on them."
Her approval galled, but I forced a smile. That she thought she could understand and relate to me could only aid my task to convince her to spare her people, couldn't it? Still, the idea that we were similar... that I had abandoned them... that the best course of action was their destruction, these thoughts gnawed at my hearts. Hadn't I as much as admitted this when I left home with the intention of spending the rest of my days on this moon? Was the hate that drove her to revenge twin to the impulse that had brought me out here, on a prophesied errand to release her?
I felt very cold.
Nightmare Moon abruptly tossed aside her makeshift blanket and rose to her full height. "Well, that's enough of bygones, wouldn't you say?" she asked, shaking her mane and appearing to be in high spirits. "It's better to look to the future. Now that we're agreed on a course of action, it's high time we began preparations for my glorious return." The towering dark creature strode to the door. "I'll need you to fill a building with air as you have this little cottage."
What was she talking about? What building?
And we were not agreed, I protested. If she'd only let me finish, she'd see that—
With her so-called magic she dragged me across the floor and pressed my face against the pane of a window. The desolate landscape rolled on as it ever had, colorless beneath the light of the sun. There was the beacon. There was the edge of my field of solar collectors, there the slope of the great crater, there the nearer hills below...
There was a new hill.
I could just make out a whirlwind of activity around it; glowing with that blue light of hers, living statues were excavating and quarrying stones, then laboriously moving them into place on the dome-shaped structure. It was enormous; hundreds of thousands of cubic ells, at the very least! She must have had her creations constructing it the entire time she'd been yammering at me.
But what was it for, I asked.
"You'll see once you've made it ready," she began, still smiling at me. "I'm sure you'll like it; it was your idea, after all!"
Having no idea what she meant and quite certain I, in fact, would not, I objected that I didn't have anywhere near enough gases to fill so vast a structure. The atmospheric mixer was designed for a small habitation like this one, not some vast uninsulated complex! Besides, how did she know we could trust those dust ponies? I reminded her of what happened last time we went among them.
Her smile drooped into a pout. "I am in complete control of all my powers, thank-you-very-much," she said, clearly offended. "Quit making excuses, Pangolin; your laziness gets less amusing by the moment. Don't expect me to believe that making a tiny bit more air is impossible for a monster that travels between the stars and keeps a little wand that throws solar fire. Put on your armor, get the air-making machine and whatever else you need, and do as I say!"
Well, I'd said my piece. If I didn't even try, it would surely go worse for me. She'd have her way, and there was nothing I could do about it. I had a spare mixer. It was only a miniature emergency model, but between the main mixer and my mostly-recovered hydroponic garden, I should be able to escape choking to death. Hopefully once the spare burned out futilely trying to pressurize the edifice she'd built, Nightmare Moon would give up whatever bizarre plan she was trying to enact. Maybe once she saw with her own eyes the limits of what my technology could accomplish, she would realize she'd asked the impossible?
Ha. And while I was at it, maybe she'd repent of her plot to wipe out her species, pledge herself to the service of the Increate and set up her own hermitage on the opposite side of the moon, never to bother me again. It seemed about as likely.
In such a situation, the path of least resistance appeared to be the only reasonable choice. I was sure by now that she'd make me regret whatever course of action I took. As she had ordered, I suited up and loaded the extra mixer, a battery, and a few spare canisters of oxygen and nitrogen gas onto a rugged little crawler cart. I had intended to use the vehicle to help move supplies to and from my cell when vessels came to resupply me. When I had arrived here, I expected these infrequent visits would be the units by which I measured a peaceful, blissful life. How long ago it seemed!
And yet it was still several months before the ship would return.
We stepped outside the habitat for the first time that long day. As before, Nightmare Moon pulled the air from the airlock along with her, hemming it in with the power of her horn. She made no attempt to help me pull the trolley through the soft dust, but between its large wheels and the minute gravity I managed it myself.
We were halfway between my dwelling and the new hill when I felt the weight of my cargo abruptly and significantly increase. I looked back to see what was the matter.
They say that if each heart skips a beat one after another, the victim will be dead by the last. I can report from personal experience that this is not true, for crouching atop the pile of hardware and materials, a mere couple ells from my head, was another glowing dust pony.
I shouted for help, pulled myself free from the cart's harness and leaped across the airless plain to catch up with my hated guest.
Utterly unconcerned, she turned to look where I was pointing, then laughed. "Get down from there!" She called to the animated dust, "He's far too feeble to pull all that junk and you at the same time."
The dust pony unfolded a pair of useless wings and leaped off the cart. It was only then I noticed that this was the little statue I'd seen three times before. It silently laughed at me as well, and waved a front leg as if greeting a now-familiar acquaintance.
I hunched down in the dust to try and gather my wits after the shock. Whatever the rest had done, this one had helped me in the past, I reminded myself. It acted as if it wished to prevent Nightmare Moon's return to the planet. Though it seemed to somehow have a close relationship with Nightmare Moon, it had never made any move against me. Its presence ought to give me confidence.
"Quit lollygagging, both of you," Nightmare Moon said harshly. She turned and continued walking toward the new hill.
I harnessed myself to the cart again and followed the staggered line of prints the exiled princess left in the dust behind her. The little statue got behind the cart and pushed.
It's pathetic, I know, but when I felt the weight of the cart lighten, tears welled up in my eyes such that I almost stumbled. That whole long month I'd been cooped up in my cell, listening to Nightmare Moon's endless complaints against her people, there hadn't been a single kind word or deed from either of us to the other. I had sat listening, plotting and hating her, and she had treated me simply as a thing at which to vent, pitying only herself and scorning all else, thinking nothing of having me sacrifice every second attending to her wishes. All that time with never a smile or a pleasant thought... helping me bear this load, an ordinary, decent, normal act, was like an oasis in the midst of the desert. I do not think the pony or the dust noticed my emotion.
As the three of us approached our destination, I marveled again that something of this size could be the work of a month. What had looked like another pale hill from my dwelling revealed itself as an elaborately designed structure. The dust ponies that had been finishing it were nowhere to be seen, but the outer wall was filled with arched niches, each containing images in a variety of postures. I was amused for a second at the thought of moving statues carving normal ones, or perhaps them posing just so and then de-animating, but when I looked more closely at them my merriment choked and died.
The postures I could recognize were troubling, and every single one's eyes rolled to track us, their expressions ranging from stern disapproval to malicious hatred. My two companions didn't seem to notice anything amiss about this.
Simply to break the terrible silence, I asked Nightmare Moon what these statues really were.
"It would be a waste to explain it to someone with such asinine misconceptions about magic," she said, ascending the short, shallow flight of stairs to the entrance.
As the little statue and I wrestled the trolley up the first step, I apologized for my earlier dismissal. She was the expert and I the lay-being, after all.
Nightmare Moon paused at the top of the stairs next to one of the statues flanking the pitch-black passageway leading within. "Very well," she said and beckoned to the statue. It was a horned wing-less one, much like the 'unicorn' in the book I'd read. The blue glow of her power suffused it and it clumsily climbed down from its pedestal and knelt before her. Its face, still sullen and hostile, belied its posture.
"Magical power," she began, "must express itself. It wells up in the innermost being and flows outward into the world. However, its outward effects can only reflect the inward nature, like so." She flicked her horn in a counterclockwise loop, and the statue's expression changed to one of blissful adoration.
"Of course, as princess and rightful ruler of the night, my own powers are immense. Because I can't actually use them as I ought imprisoned here, It seeps out, wasted, and takes, among other things, the form of these stupid dustballs representing the injustice I've suffered at the hooves of the ponies." As she spoke, the statue's head slowly turned away from her until it was pointing straight backwards, a position that I was certain would be fatal or at least excruciating for a flesh-and-blood pony. Its smile now looked hollow and mindless, a mockery of true expression.
Nightmare Moon apparently found the sight as disconcerting as I did. She took a step back and blinked. "I... huh. That's new." She said. "When my attention's on them, they're only able to do what I wish."
Why then, I asked, did she twist its head?
She appeared flustered. "It's... it's an image of a pony so of course it's going to misbehave and try to make me look foolish. It has to be true to that nature too, doesn't it?" It looked to me as if she was primarily trying to convince herself. Her horn's glow redoubled and the statue awkwardly rose, still mutilated, and returned to its pedestal.
'Only able to do what she wished' indeed! Instead of calling her on the obvious falsehood, I asked about the one next to me, helping me pull the cart up the stairs. Why did she speak to this one and never to any of the others? Was it special somehow?
"That one? Don't concern yourself. Just quit blabbering and bring those things inside." She turned and disappeared into the pitch-dark passage leading inside the structure.
The little statue smiled mysteriously at me and shrugged. The gesture seemed even more natural after the other dust pony's chilling behavior. I felt no doubt that it was something entirely unlike the rest, though composed of the same substance.
The two of us finished lugging the trolley up the stairs (which I was sure Nightmare Moon could have done with minimal effort in the blink of an eye, the haughty, thoughtless villain!) and followed the princess into the darkened interior of this new structure. I still had no idea what she had meant when she credited me for inspiring this edifice, only that I was sure the answer would not be a pleasing one.