//------------------------------//
// CH. 21 Corruption 
// Story: Who Needs the Sunshine 
// by Atuhor Name 
//------------------------------//


Corruption


        Twilight awoke to see a blur of red and black. When the melange of colors in front of her focused, she was greeted with a particularly unpleasant sight.
        Twilight looked up directly into Naudia's bruised and battered face. A stream of dried blood was caked onto the right side of her face, and one of her fangs was missing. And when Twilight really got looking at Naudia, she noticed one of Naudia’s wings was broken off.
        "UuuuaAH!" Twilight said, wrestling with her vocal cords.
        "Are you alright, Twilight?" Naudia asked, her face a mask of concern, underneath the bruises.
        "Am I all right? Who cares about me? Are YOU all right?"
        "What?"
        "Your face, your fang, your wing!" Twilight sputtered.
        "Oh, these?" Naudia gestured to her numerous injuries offhandedly. "Assuming I maintain the diet I'm on right now, they'll heal and grow back in a week. For the moment though I’m more concerned about you. That was a nasty mana short I had to put you through."
        "Now that you mention it," Twilight said, rubbing her horn, "My horn is pretty sore. Hasn't felt like this since I was doing levitation drills during school. They kept us at that for hours." Twilight frowned at the memory.
        "No exhaustion? Injuries? Can you tell if you're bleeding from somewhere? This is important, because we can't go around the desert leaving a trail of pony blood. Sand walkers can smell it miles off."
        After checking herself over and not even finding so much as a papercut, Twilight finally regained the presence of mind to ask what had happened last night.
        "Well, you're a very powerful unicorn, and things out here feed off of magic. Some are very much more insistent than others."
        "I remember having dinner with you and Celestia and... and then Chrysalis attacked us. But it was all hazy, like I wasn't really a part of things."
        "That's the effect of the sand spirits. They forced you to create an illusory version of your strongest desire, so you'd expend magic and not struggle too much to break free..."
        There was an awkward silence for a long moment until Naudia spoke up.
        "I do finally have some good news though," Naudia said, rubbing her horn, which had grown itchy for some reason. "We're about a day’s walk from Dodge Junction right now! And... well, there's something I need to ask you to do."
        Naudia frowned, half from the itchy horn, and half from what she was about to ask Twilight to do.
        "Twilight, I need you to..." Naudia stopped mid-scratch on her horn, visibly frightened. "They're here. I can feel them."
        "Who?" Twilight said, trying to catch Naudia's attention. "Who's here?"
        "Twilight, I'm going to ask you a question. It is not rhetorical or hypothetical in any way. I need a straight answer, right now." Naudia was suddenly intense and agitated in an unsettling way.
        "Ummm, OK?" said a now worried Twilight.
        "Twilight, do you love me?"
        "What?"
        "Time is short, Twilight! This is very important, I need an answer right now! Do you love me?"
        Twilight froze for a moment, uncertain, then a memory came back to her: a quiet time by the lake. A shared moment, a perfect moment.
        "Yes. Yes I do."
        "All right then. Twilight, do you trust me?"
        "Yes."
        "OK. We are about to be attacked by corrupted changelings. I believe I can fight them off. If I survive fighting them off, you're going to need to nurse me back to health, so I'm giving you access to the food bags. You're going to have to trust me, Twilight. I don't have time now, but you have to let me explain what you find in there."
        "If you survive?" Twilight looked like somebody had pulled the floor out from under her.
        "Whatever you do, Twilight, do not bring me into Dodge Junction until I've recovered, even if it looks like I won't. This is very important."
        "But-"
        "No time now, Twilight. I must go. Remember," Naudia kissed Twilight on the cheek. "I love you."
        And Naudia turned away, walking out of the cave, horn already glowing green with a light that grew in intensity with every moment.
        Twilight surreptitiously followed her out to the edge of the cave, hiding behind a rock to watch. Peering over to the desert beyond, she was stunned to see a gigantic amorphous mass coating the ground around the cave and forming a ring mere feet away from Naudia and the cave entrance.
        The black goo constantly shifted as if it was alive, revealing changeling limbs and heads surfacing before merging back into the mass below unpleasantly. It looked, for lack of a better word, angry. Even Twilight could feel the waves of hatred washing off of it like a storm.
        Naudia's horn reached a blinding crescendo of light as she began to rise into the air, the corrupted changelings visibly shrinking away from the light. And then suddenly, the pent-up love exploded outwards in a nova that briefly outshone the sun.
        And then there was silence.

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        Twilight awoke sometime later. She really didn't know how long it had been, but the sun was much lower in the sky. She stood up groggily for the second time that day, trying to get her bearings. Half in a daze, she collected Naudia from a ring of black soot, and stopped mid-heft.
        Naudia had barely any weight to her at all, certainly dangerously less than she had when Twilight picked her up back in the city. She had a very weak pulse, and seemed to have become perceptibly thinner.
        Twilight just stared blankly down at the changeling queen for a very long moment.
        A minute or so later, Twilight gently brought Naudia back into the cave, unsure of how to medicate a changeling, or even if you could medicate a changeling. Twilight curled up to Naudia's noticeably cold body and tried to sleep. All she could do now was hope.
        Twilight felt numb. The past few days’ events had finally gotten to her. She wanted to cry but tears wouldn't come. She wanted to sleep, but sleep wouldn't come. She wanted out of this desert...
        A loud grumble reminded her that there was something she could do right now, so Twilight reached over to Naudia's saddlebags. When Twilight grabbed the unlocked food bag, there was a clunk of metal from inside. Carefully, she lifted the food out and peered into the bottom of the bag.