The old road ran down into a wet bottomland.
The Moon Princess remembered when this had been Greenvale, a small town grown up to serve the Castle of the Royal Pony Sisters and the caravans coming from the north. There had been farms, and inns, shops and noble villas, warmth and life and happiness. When the old castle was abandoned, the town lost its reason for being, and the forest reclaimed its own. The nearby river was no longer kept clear, and the waters turned the flatlands into a reeking swamp.
Knowing what to look for and where to look, she could see the anomalous regularity of certain mounds that had once been beautiful mansions, in some of which she had personally enjoyed pleasant hospitality. Here and there, the collapse of part of a hillock revealed an old wall, or a broken column climbed free from the surrounding soil. In places the ground had washed away to leave behind a field of curiously-blocky rocks, the rubble of what had once been fine-dressed masonry.
To the Princess, the site was melancholy, a reminder of better days past. When I reclaim my own, she wondered, if I rebuild the castle, will a new village spring up here? Will Greenvale once again be a place for ponies? Then she remembered that such would not happen -- she would bring Night Eternal, and surely everything would have to change to suit such a new order. Perhaps one day, though -- when the ponies have adapted? It could be lovely again ...
Celestia's champions, of course, knew nothing of the past glories of this valley.
"Ewwggh!" complained the prissy white unicorn as her hooves began to squelch on the increasingly damp ground. "My eyes need a rest from all this icky muck."
Her wish was soon granted, as the path led into dense woods. Great boughs closed off the sky above the six ponies, who now found themselves moving in almost pitch-black night.
"Well, I didn't mean that literally," the white unicorn said.
"That ancient ruin could be right in front of our faces and we wouldn't even know it," commented the lavender stargazer, her voice stressed with worry.
Not likely, thought the Princess as she floated past their hooves, her own iridescence shifted away from the visible band of the electromagnetic spectrum, to avoid accidentally aiding her foes in their quest for light. But then not even a scholar such as yourself has ever seen my old castle -- nor, evidently, has its exact location been preserved in the maps.
She was briefly saddened by this, that such beauty could just vanish with the passage of time. But then so much had already been lost -- so many proud towns had been abandoned during the Time of Discord, never to be reponied; Paradise Estate naught but a low mound elsewhere in this forest; all the glory of the Age of Wonders itself but a stratigraphic layer from which ponies might unearth the occasional incomprehensible artifact. And that was only what had left remnants -- the whole World That Never Was, in all its gorgeous hothouse efflorescence, had been literally edited out of the timestream -- an action in which her Cosmic self had directly participated.
It was one thing to know that all, in the end, must succumb to Entropy. It was quite another to witness this personally. The Moon Princess had known such thoughts frequently before, but still they made her melancholy.
And now it was time to assist in this process. Nightmare Moon streaked ahead of her sister's champions to the grove of trees she had previously prepared. Radiating faintly in the ultraviolet, she merged with the nearest trunk, flashing from tree to tree, activating the spells she had laid upon them.
Very dimly, the trees began to glow, as their shapes started subtly changing.
"Ah, wait," said Applejack. She raised one hoof, looking disgustedly at the dark muck clinging to that member. "Ah think ah stepped in something."
Fluttershy's terrified shriek seemed something of an overreaction.
"It's just mud," pointed out Applejack, looking back in surprise at her friend. Because the Apple mare's head was turned, she actually bumped into the first glowing bole.
"Aah!" she cried out in shock as she saw its gruesome parody of a face, complete with malign staring eyes and great circular, tooth-ringed mouth. The tree audibly snarled at her.
Applejack leaped away in horror, bounding several body lengths back to her companions.
It was at this point that the other trees the Nightmare had ensorceled revealed their own faces, snarling at the six ponies. Celestia's champions cringed in fear, releasing shrieks of their own, as they realized that they were surrouned by arboreal monsters. They backed into a defensive circle.
The trees began to move ...
It was a brilliantly triple-layered trap. The first enchantment was a simple audio-visual illusion, to create the nightmare faces and the hostile growls. Tied to it was a fear spell, to rob those experiencing the illusion from applying normal critical reasoning to the encounter. But, if some cooler-headed pony, such as the lavender unicorn or Applejack, realized what was going on, Nightmare Moon had laid a final layer to the trap: she could animate one tree at a time to make an actual attack.
At best, she might take out some of her foes; at worst, she would send them fleeing through the forest in utter panic, hopefully scattering so that she might pick them off one by one.
The pink earth pony walked right up to one of the most fearsome of the illusions and started to laugh directly into its face.
Her five friends gasped in astonishment.
The Moon Princess was also more than a bit surprised by this, but she had prepared for just such a situation. This time, you pay for your bravado, she thought, and flowed into the great bole.
The pink earth pony began to make silly faces at the tree.
Nightmare Moon prepared to warp the wood, intending to reach out with the tree's branches, sweep the insane pink pony into its fanged maw, and crush her to a bloody shambles. Seeing that should shatter her enemies' morale, and rid her of a dangerous reality warper.
The lavender mage seemed aware of the same possibility. "Pinkie ... what are you doing?" she cried to her friend. "Run!"
Nightmare Moon exerted her power.
Nothing happened.
This was the second time something of this sort had happened tonight, and this time Fluttershy had nothing to do with it.
"Oh, girls," said Pinkie, looking back in complete contempt of the snarling tree monster right in front of her nose "don't you see?"
Wait, her name is Pinkie? thought the Princess of the Night. No. She can't be. She literally can't be ... Because she never was ...
Utterly ignoring her peril, Pinkie began to do a little dance, and sing:
"When I was a little filly / and the Sun was going down ..."
Her cute little flank with the balloon marking on it swayed fetchingly, and entirely inappropriately for someone under attack by unknown creatures in a cursed forest.
She was paying absolutely no attention to the tree monster, whose every fiber Nightmare Moon was repeatedly attempting to warp into the attack. This would have been fatal for the pink simpleton, if it were not for the fact that the Moon Princess' strongest magic was proving entirely ineffective at so much as twitching the plant. Nightmare Moon became aware of a mounting thaumaturgic pressure, as if incredibly-powerful forces were being summoned to the grove.
"Tell me she is not," said the lavender unicorn in utter disbelief.
"The darkness and the shadows," continued Pinkie, inserting her head on the end of a neck which was, suddenly, impossibly long and coming from an overead angle not even remotely corresponding to her torso's last known location. Her friends were a bit startled by this, but remarkably accepting of the anomaly. "They would always make me frown," Her head now darted in from another overhead angle, this time upside down.
"She is ..." commented the white unicorn, with resignation.
"I'd hide under my pillow / from what I thought I saw," sang Pinkie, now bounding cheerfully behind them.
This was the first time Nightmare Moon had actually seen her move in any physically-possible way since her first shift in positional location. It wasn't conventional teleportation, she thought. Some sort of instanteous creation and destruction of precisely-shaped wormholes? suggested the voice of Moondreamer from within her. No, said a cold voice from far deeper, she's ignoring this reality and substituting her own -- danger!
"But Granny-Pie said that wasn't the way / to deal with fears at all," continued the pink pony, bounding in a complete clockwise circle around her friends.
The Moon Princess noticed that the thaumaturgical radiation was spilling from Pinkie, and as she described that circle, reality itself was swirling, much like spacetime in the presence of an immense rotating mass. The fear spell deflected from this annular distortion, spraying ineffectually away from Celestia's champions, who began to relax.
"So what is ...?" asked Rainbow.
Pinkie immediately darted in and leaned confidentially, singing right into the face of her blue friend.
"She said 'Pinkie, you gotta stand up tall ... learn to face your fears," Pinkie sang, darting away to bound up to one of the trees. The fear spell on that tree radiated fiercely, driven by Nightmare Moon's black will ... to dissipate harmlessly against the swirl of unreality which was now wound around Pinke Pie, thread on her spindle. It was not a normal counterspell, nor even normal disbelief. It was a refusal to let the magic affect her.
"'You'll see that they can't hurt you / Just laugh to make them disappear ..." Pinkie danced at the tree, then stood tall on her hind legs, arms raised in invocation.
The thaumaturgic field concentrated around Pinkie.
She whirled and laughed directly into the tree's face."
"Ha! Ha! Ha!" With each distinct exhalation, the strength of her thaumaturgy surged. At the third one, the local laws of spacetime could no longer support the existence of a spell on that tree.
So the spell vanished.
Pinkie turned triumphantly, smiled at her friends.
They gasped in astonishment. The shock was most extreme on the faces of the two unicorns, who must have sensed the same thing Nightmare Moon had through their horns. The lavender one's expression became intently focused as if she were trying to commit what she had just witnessed to memory.
The Moon Princess wondered briefly how much the lavender mage understood of what she had sensed. Probably not much, she decided. I didn't really understand what I was seeing the first time she did this to me, and I had full access to my Cosmic knowledge then.
Except that the encounter had never happened ...
An awareness and energy that must surely have been beyond all their comprehensions flashed from Pinkie to her five companions. The reality-distortion now emanated from them as well, though with lesser strength, as if they were moons reflecting the light of a sun. It suited Pinkie that they be at least temporarily gifted with her own ability, and the Universe shifted so that this became true.
Nightmare Moon recoiled in pained horror as spillover from the wave of Pinkie's Laughter burned her.
"So ..."
Five more voices joined to make Pinkie's song a chorus.
"Giggle at the ghosties!"
Fluttershy flew up to a moderate-sized tree-monster, and literally giggled, sounding like a little filly. Fluttershy's psychic ability should not have affected its enchantment, as the tree had no mind to charm. It didn't -- it was the warp borrowed from Pinkie which caused the Nightmare's magic to be instantly dispelled. This time, it vanished at the first sounds of Fluttershy's laughter.
"Guffaw at the grossly," continued Pinkie, violating the rules of proper Equestrian speech along with the laws of reality. Both reality and the grammar elementals yielded to the power of Pinkie's will.
Rainbow laughed mockingly at another tree, and its enchantment became but a swirl of stray magic.
"Crack up at the creepy ..."
Pinkie, leading the white unicorn to a tree. That unicorn laughed with a surprising lack of decorum, and that enchantment was no more.
"Whoop it up with the weepy ..."
Pinkie merely pointed Applejack at a tree.
"Woo-hoo!" the Apple mare exulted, executing an acrobatic leap off Pinkie's back, and annihilating the enchantment with the same casual grace that she did everything.
Pinkie had to push the purple mage at her target. The unicorn's eyes were nervous with disbelief at the technique she was witnessing.
"Chortle at the kooky!"
At the mage's laugh the counterspell, executed with perfect precision on the first try, unwound the dweomer. She snickered, neatly removing the last traces of Nightmare Moon's magic from the bole.
Despite her dismay, the Moon Princess could not help but be impressed at the stargazer's skill. She did understand it just by watching it done, she realized. And mastered it to the point that, even with her own more limited command of pure thaumaturgy, she can probably do it again. Which means, unfortunately, that there's now a whole class of my magic she now knows how to counter.
"Snortle at the spooky!" sang Pinkie, poking a head on a giraffe-long neck upside down from some direction in which the rest of her body could not possibly be located. Nobody but Nightmare Moon noticed this.
The enchantments on a whole stand of trees were no more.
"And ..." Pinkie began. The swirling mass of reality distortion rose, began swirling overhead like one of Nightmare Moon's own cold-plasma clouds. It began spinning faster. The spell's power began mounting once more.
The Moon Princess looked upward in alarm.
"And tell that big dumb scary face ..."
Pinkie popped up on one side of a tree.
"... to take a hike and leave you alone ..."
Then on the other side. With nowhere near enough time to have moved.
"... and if he thinks he can scare you then he's got another think coming ..."
Upside down now, hanging from the branches ... there were branches close enough, weren't there? Nightmare Moon could not be certain. She trailed the reality-distortion, forming what with mounting concern the Moon Princess realized was a wave guide.
Then Pinkie vanished and popped up inside the mouth of a tree whose mouth was illusory .. how? ... the trail of unreality formed into a spike ... an emitter ...
"... and the very idea of such a thing just makes you wanna..."
The spell's energy shifted. The Princess could feel its vibrations attuning themselves to the exact frequencies needed to dampen something ... her own pattern!
"... hahahahah... heh.."
Pinkie laughed uncontrollably. The pink pony's spell began building, throbbing, ready for release ...
Nightmare Moon bolted, a streak of cold fire dodging between trees, up a hillside, down the other side, into a gully until there were many yards of solid earth and rock between her and the awful thing churning behind her.
"LAAAUUGH!!!"
Soundless, lightless, even through thousands of yards of atmosphere and hundreds of solid matter, the Moon Princess felt her soul resonate and almost shatter at the tremendous thaumaturgical eruption which came from the faraway pink mare. For a moment her every extra sense was overloaded as if by blinding radiance. Seconds later, the boughs rustled to an unseen wind as the telekinetic shockwave hit her. A rainbow, composed of frequencies invisible to the naked eye, and that were not even electromagnetic, rose in a column from the hills behind. Its top began to spread out at the top of that stupendous stalk, like the cap of some enormous mushroom.
She did not know what was happening behind her. She did not want to know what was happening behind her. She was sure that her every enchantment on the grove had been disrupted -- no constructs of mere magic could hope to survive in close proximity to that dreadful geas -- laid not on pony minds, but on the very fabric of reality. She was also fairly certain that none of Pinkie's friends had been in any wise adversely affected by that impossible counterspell. She knew that she did not want to be in Pinkie's presence again.
If she had possessed a physical heart in this form, it would have been pounding. As it was, the swirl of glowing fog that was Nightmare Moon rose shakily, then darted in the direction of her castle. She paused only to perform one last act of delay, a minor mutilation on a great river serpent in the hope that it would block the ford, impose some delay on her sister's champions, whom she no longer believed she had any real hope of defeating alone if she faced them en masse.
She knew now who Pinkie was. She had a very good idea what Pinkie was.
And the knowledge terrified her.