After the cylinder came to a stop, Rainbow Dash hung between the tight chains, shivering. Darkness loomed all around her. Then, something shifted again from the pitch black ether. Loud grinding noises issued across the cavern, like the scraping of mountains against one another. She heard a voice—louder than a million muffled screams—and it shook her already throbbing head to the core.
Rainbow Dash winced. Her eyes flickered yellow and red again. Something glinted off the ruby lightning bolt of the Loyalty pendant ahead of her, and she was forced to glance forward.
Something was glowing from down below. A sea of dim silver shapes wobbled left and right, glowing closer, clearer. She saw pale white obelisks, blanketed in powdery sediment. The longer she saw them shifting and darting about in the darkness, the greater a bone-chilling shiver overcame her insides.
There was a prolonged, ragged breath. Some hideous wind billowed against her multicolored bangs, and the voice that came with it shook her fractured, mutating skull.
"Mrrmmmmmmmdoes it live? Hrmmmmmdoes it love? Doessssssss it haaaaate?"
The entire platform beneath Rainbow Dash shook with timely thuds. Something was marching towards her through the darkness, its massive legs pounding into unseen rock and granite.
The dim light intensified, a sickly pale glow of blue and aquamarine shine. Then two gnarled trees were hoisted up from below. Only—they weren't trees. Their jagged branches stretched upwards and outwards, dangling with brittle white crystals just as pale as the shards lodged in the creature's humongous backside.
As the head raised into view, Rainbow Dash squeaked inwardly. The massive thing had antlers. On top of that, half of its face was overgrown with soiled brown goat fur. She was almost too stricken by these details to bother taking in the snout of the creature as a whole. It was then that she saw the pale blue scales, the flaring nostrils with burning red embers, and at last two sets of reptilian jaws that opened up with teeth large enough to bite chunks out of mountainsides.
"Mmmmmmdoessss it feeed...?" The mouth of the thing lunged forward.
"Nnngh!" Rainbow Dash's neck tilted away. However, the jaws stopped just meters away from her Loyalty pendant.
Slowly, with tiny shivers, the creature's head drifted back. A pair of slitted eyes opened, paler than a full moon. As a ragged breath came from the creature, its sockets flickered red-and-yellow and back to the cataract-gray haze.
"Httttkkk!" The immense beast reared back, exposing the full length of its decrepit body and its two weakly thrashing tails. Over a hundred large chunks of white crystal were lodged in its backside, shoulders, and sides. As it tilted its snout aside to gaze at Rainbow Dash closer, the pegasus could see new and fresh obelisks of pale crystal pushing out from the cracks in its scales like alabaster postules. "No... thisssss one does not feed. Hckkkk-Mmmmmmlove is strong. Hate is—mmmmmmmm—strong..." It held a large, scaled hand over Rainbow's figure while its nostrils inhaled, exhaled, inhaled, exhaled—summoning a cyclone with each heated gust. "It smellssssssssnkkkt—of alicorns and flame. Mmmmmmm-the wombbbb of this false world. Hckkkkkktt!" A ghostly glow shot along the largest of its spine-pierced crystals. "Axan... Axannnnnnnn-beloved sisterrrrrr. You were here. Yessssss-snkkkt... you were here..."
Rainbow's lips pursed. In spite of her harrowing predicament, she stammered towards the beast. "You're... you're not a serpent goddess! You're a Divine!" She squinted at the white shards protruding all along the dragon's scaled figure. "Chaos... strips...?"
"Hrkkkk-Mmmmm-Austraeohhhhhh..." The dragon spread a pair of taggered wings, each leathery spoke dangling with craggy crystals of unnatural luminescence. "The flame of the gears and spokes of the wombbbbbb..." Her two jaws clenched and unclenched, drooling bile and blood. "My brood is good, for my brood has found itttttt. There is mmmmm-magic left on this false world. And where there is magic, there is hope, Austraeoh..."
"Magic... Magic..." Rainbow Dash thought out loud. More blood trickled down her forehead. She fought her way past a splitting headache, then gasped. "Nevlamas!" Her eyes darted up weakly. "You're Nevlamas! The Divine of Magic!"
"Axan spared herrrrr. But why...?"
"What..." Rainbow's jaw quivered. "What happened to you?"
"Of courrrrrrse. She rememberssss. She remembers where the flame goessss." Nevlamas leaned her mutated heard forward until her antlers were stretched on either side of the platform, shrouding Rainbow in even thicker shadows. "A blessinggggggg. A blessing of love and hate..."
"What are you doing?" Rainbow hissed through another wave of pain. She heard a crackling noise from her forehead. The hint of two bony stalks flickered in her upper peripheral. She glanced at her own forehead, then at the enormous draconian antlers looming on either side of her. "Oh, buck, no..."
"Does it understanddddd? Hckkkk—the whispers from beyond? The truth abouttttt love and peace...?"
"Nevlamas, listen to me!" Rainbow Dash's voice cracked. "Something's wrong with you! These Xonans! These nasty, nasty unicorns have done something horrible to you! I know! I've met your sister Axan! The Divine of Flame! She wasn't screwed up with chaos shards like this! She was normal!"
"Austraeohhhh doesn't understand—Snkkkkkt!" The pale slits flickered red and yellow again. Rainbow's loyalty pendant rattled in its brace like an heirloom possessed. "My brood found me this wayyyyyyyy. My children carry me into greatness..."
"The friggin' heck are you even talking about?"
"She knowsssss... she will know..." Nevlama leaned forward so that its breath was almost inhaling the pegasus. "One of the same... the Divine and the eastward pony..."
"No!" Rainbow Dash suddenly snarled. Her lips bled as two of her teeth suddenly turned pointed and scraped along her lower muzzle. "We are... nnngh... n-nothing alike!" The knobs along her skull grew two more centimeters, and she sputtered into the trickling blood. "Hckkkkt!"
"One breath... summoned from the darkness... The shards around Nevalamas' neck lit up like a crystalline halo, shining a beacon onto Rainbow's likewise mutating figure. "And she will know her place. She will know... the path of Harmony..."
At that precise moment, bolts of electrical mana flickered between Nevlamas' antlers, and Rainbow Dash was in the center. The beams covered her in a pale blue flash!
"Aaaaaaugh!" Rainbow Dash flew backwards and gripped her skull, only to freeze in place. She blinked her eyes open, glancing at her flapping wings on either side of her. Twirling around, she found herself hovering in the center of a starry sky. "What... wh-what the heck?!"
"Deep in its equine heart, it knows," chanted a booming voice from beyond the cosmos. "The heartbeat to this world is a false one. It masquerades as truth beneath the veil of dull flame and rusted metal."
Rainbow Dash spun in circles, panting. She felt along her neck and forehead. The pendant was missing, and her growing antlers had disappeared.
"Austraeoh knows... she knows that the world is dying. And it is dying because the ring is not whole."
Thunder cracked. Rainbow Dash winced. A heated wind pushed at her tail, and she found herself gliding forward, diving past stars and constellations. As she approached the speed of light, an inconceivably enormous structured loomed before her, flickering like a crescent against the nebulae around it. But as she came closer, there were multiple explosions. With a burst of lavender light, what was once one became twelve, and they spread apart like leaves across a frozen black pond.
"The universe desires harmony. It craves the singularity, the beautiful peace and love of oneness, where everything is perfect and everything is assured. This is not possible in a world shattered like brittle stone. I have witnessed this, heard this, for it resonates through the leylines of magic like discordant notes, and I am the Divine of magic. I know that this world cannot be harmonic. The planes are like pieces to a song, and they are all scattered. I have taken it upon myself to rebuild it with a righteous chorus."
With another flash of light, Rainbow Dash found herself orbiting a lone crescent of continental metal. Only one end was lit by the Sun and Moon, while the other lingered in perpetual darkness. However, on all sides of the floating landscape, the cosmos had been blotted out by an anomalous cloud of distorted shadows. Figures darted in and out of the miasma, their serpentine bodies crowned with fangs and antlers as they flung their jackal screams into eternity.
"And yet, since the Sundering, the predators of malice, the chaos lords, have sought to shatter the bridge between harmony and eternal silence. They are selfish, wicked souls. Born from nothing and capable of everything. Ravenous demons, agents of cacophony. They rape and defile the broken pieces of the song, simply because they can. Their blood is the very essence of chaos. They know no love or peace. Blessed Endrax, beloved sister. You thought you could kill them. Your foolishness is enamoring, but it spells death to this shattered plane. That is why I chose to do that which you could not, which none of our Sisters could..."
Before Rainbow's twitching eyes, a draconian figure flew into the clouds of chaos. With an ear-splitting scream, Nevlamas' body burrowed into the onyx mess, and soon the darkness split apart, illuminated from within like a bone pale candle inside an obsidian cage. Pieces of dragoneqi flew every which way, and yet the aura that polluted them soon imploded, flying back into Nevalamas' figure. She hissed and shrieked, but ultimately curled up into a limp ball as her flesh split in a hundred places with brittle pale shards of metal and crystal protruding through her scales.
"And in the haven of my enemy, I realized the truth. The chaos lingers only because there is something for it to feed off of. Whatever caused the Sundering, it was simply hungry... craving pain and agony and suffering. If the feast was accelerated... if all the food was cleared off the table... then what would give chaos a reason to stay?"
With a bellowing shriek, Nevalamas thrashed her limbs in every direction. The darkness shattered, and in its wake Rainbow Dash found herself sailing down a metal trench at blazing speeds. Pedestal after pedestal of lavender flame soared past her, their flames flickering in and out of existence.
"The beacons... they burn for no one. Even you, Austraeoh, have found them weak and frail. They wither and fade like all light, for this world has a problem. It doesn't know how to die quickly enough. I now know what the chaos lords knew: that the only way to reunite all life is to eliminate all life. The ring was sundered for a sin so old that not even the Divines remember it. If we destroy the harborers of discord, then we create a vacuum, and all that can exist there is harmony."
In another flash of cosmic brilliance, Rainbow Dash had a vision of the twelve pieces of the ring floating together. Barren and stripped of color, the clouds of chaos dissipated, leaving the ring alone. As the stars dimmed in the distance, the twelve pieces made contact, and the lavender glow burned like a righteous beacon.
"And in that new world, from the clean slate of desolation, a new song will be born. There will be peace. There will be love. For the ark of all life will have been given a second chance, a righteous chance. This is the only path to redemption, Austraeoh. It is up to you and I to accelerate what has already gone into motion."
"No... No!" Rainbow Dash shook her head and yelled, "You've got it all wrong, Nevlamas! Don't you get it?! You've been twisted! Polluted! Maybe you started out trying to find harmony, but these... these chaos yahoos! These brothers and sisters of Discord or whatever—they messed with your head! Who ever heard about rebooting harmony by destroying everything?!" She panted and wheezed into the surmounting darkness of the universe. "You are a Divine of Magic! Not chaos! Fight it, Nevlamas! Fight it, and see what you've done to this... this poor, poor continent of warring ponies!"
"It is far too late for that. I have heard the song. The Princess found me in the ashes of madness. She cleansed my body and conveyed my new power into righteousness. Her children are now my children, and my brood will usher in the chorus of harmonic glory."
"Darn it, no!" Rainbow Dash frowned. "Lasairfion is full of it! I don't know how she found you, but she's using you, Nevlamas! You smell the scent of Axan on me, don't you?! What about Celestia?! Or Luna?! Or Whitemane?! Remember who they are and who they stand for! You cannot rebuild this world through chaos! Destroying all that lives is not only super lame—but it's the total opposite of what you first started out to do! There's nothing about that's peaceful! Nothing about it that's loving! Nothing about it that's... that's... loyal—!"
Flash!
Rainbow Dash gasped. She sat in the center of Ponyville, and the air was filled with screams. She looked up in time to see her five friends explode, one after another, bathing the grassy floor with brittle white ash. Applejack's howl left a lingering noise in Rainbow's ear, like a tolling bell. The pegasus screamed into the deathly snow, and blood flew as antlers spread from her forhead and fangs grew from her muzzle.
She collapsed on the floor, writhing as her feathers peeled away, revealing leather wings. A serpent's tail thrashed left and right with tufts of goat fur. In front of her quivering face, the dust collected together, pooling into one amorphous blob of pale ash. Rainbow Dash looked at it, and her red-on-yellow eyes reflected a pulsing lavender glow.
From the ashes of her friends came a thick tome covered in ancient runes. The pages spread open, and from the words there came a cloud of chaotic sediment that mutated into Nevlamas' altered face. The two sets of jaws moved in time with the ghostly voice.
"Do you hear it, Austraeoh?! Do you hear hear the song and understand the cost of restoring harmony?!"
"Shut up!" Rainbow Dash's voice cracked as she lunged forward. "Leave me alone!" She clamped the book shut, hugging it close to her body. The pendant of loyalty materialized around her neck. With one pulse, it dragged her eastward like a leesh at a thousand miles per second. She soared through marshlands, forests, mountains, deserts, and cities. At last, tracing the fractured pathways of her mind, the book carried her into the crater-strewed wasteland of a perpetual battlefield. Ledomaritan and Xonan ships waged war on either sice of a gaping crevice. Rainbow Dash dove right in, carrying the book towards an exposed pedestal of the machine world, where the lavender flame erupted all around her, rekindled.
Flash!
All went dark. Rainbow Dash hung limply off the chains, her eyelids fallen shut as her bleeding forehead drifted in the currents of a breath from beyond.
"Mmmmmmkkkkt! A crevice... a crack in the wombbbbb of the world. So, I see." Nevlamas' battered body sunk back into the depths below. "Thankkkkk you, Austraeoh, for now we know where to send our brood... and the righteous venom of the song."
As Nevlamas slinked away, the cylinder hummed, raising Rainbow's unconscious body back up towards the summit of the cavern from whence it came.