The sun rose slowly, almost reluctantly, over Equestria that day, as though it feared what it would see. It had every right to be afraid. When the sun’s rays finally reached Manehatten, what it saw was carnage, pure and simple. The heads, hearts, and other parts of ponies were impaled triumphantly on banners, dangled from chains, or bolted to crude armor. The streets were full of corpses and unconscious revelers who might soon wish they were corpses. Rot had begun to spread with an unnatural quickness amongst the dead of yesterday. Bodies were bloated, reeking things looking like they were ready to burst. Some already had.
High in the ruins of what had once been a famed skyscraper, a blue earth pony was hard work. Ignoring the foul stench of Nurgle that permeated even here, Lord Sorcerer Xerxes was dully reciting yet another chant revealed to him by the blessing of his god. Xerxes was not the name he had been born with, but he had considered it who he was ever since he had first felt the call of Lord Tzeentch, so many years ago now. The office around him, already scarred and warped by overexposure to the taint of Chaos, trembled a little further as a tendril of stray magic twisted a section of plaster wall into living, bleeding muscle. Xerxes paid it no heed.
When the chant was finished at last, Xerxes hit the floor with his staff. Once, twice, three times, and so on until he had hit it nine times. Purple-blue smoke began to coalesce, slowly at first, then picking up speed as the sorcerer’s spell penetrated the fog of wild Chaos magic that had permeated the city, blocking all attempts at scrying. Xerxes simply waited, indifferent to the spectacle but impatient to get this over with. There was so much more for him to do this day.
Eventually, the smoke formed into the vague outline of a large buffalo, his traditional tribal war paint replaced with the symbols of the Dark Gods painted with whatever he could find. Xerxes found it rather passé.
“Report, general,” the blue pony said imperiously, “What news from the front?”
The buffalo grinned so widely that Xerxes found it idiotic. “The strategy worked perfectly, my lord. Neither the fools in my tribe nor Appleloosa ever saw anything coming until it was too late.”
“Chief Thunderhooves? Sheriff Silverstar?”
The buffalo’s grin somehow contrived to get wider. “Dead,” he said, with obvious relish.
Xerxes looked bored. “Appleloosa?”
“In our hooves.”
“Survivors?”
“What pitiful few remain are in our captivity until the see the wisdom of joining us… or we get hungry.” The buffalo licked his lips. Xerxes held his muzzle high and sniffed aristocratically.
“Are there any who escaped?”
For the first time, the buffalo’s expression dropped slightly. “Ummm…” He hesitated.
“Please, tell me you’re not thinking of lying to me.”
He shook his head rapidly. “No! No, of course not, my lord! A mere… handful have escaped into the desert. Our best runners are tracking them even now.”
“Good, do not permit their escape. And prepare the ritual site, our lord will have need of it very soon.”
“It will be done, my lord.”
“I am sure it will. Now, I have many other tasks to attend to. I leave this in your capable hooves, general.” Xerxes waved his staff through the shaky illusion, dissipating the smoke and the buffalo it formed. With a sigh, he began chanting the same spell again. There were so many more reports to collect.
…
Half a continent away, in Canterlot, Princess Celestia stared at the slowly rising sun with tired, downcast eyes. She’d been up all night, working herself to exhaustion. First protecting the vault, then trying to ascertain what had happened in Manehatten. It was no good – all her scrying and communication spells had shown her nothing more than a swirling vortex of maddening Chaos magic. Luna and her servants had tried to persuade to the Princess of the Sun to rest, to no avail. As the sun came up, Celestia hung her head in shame and tears trickled down her cheeks.
This whole catastrophe was her fault, this she knew. She was Princess of Equestria, until very recently the land’s one and only ruler, and she had been for a thousand years. Whoever and whatever had caused this, it had been present for some time, that much was clear. Somepony had been planning to bring this apocalypse down on the heads of her little ponies for years, if not decades, and she’d been completely blindsided by it. She’d failed her subjects, failed her student, and failed her sister, utterly and without reserve. How could she have been so ignorant of what had been brewing? Shouldn’t she, of all ponies, have sensed the buildup to this?
Celestia shook her head slowly as she softly cried. That nopony had even questioned her even after all this somehow made things even worse. The rioters who had intermittently rocked Canterlot had blamed guards, blamed advisors, blamed administrators for their woes, but never their beloved princess. Never Celestia. After how utterly she had failed to protect them, they still trusted her completely. It made her heart break.
However, the Princess of the Sun could never have managed to rule the land for a thousand years after banishing her own sister if she didn’t possess an iron core of resolve. It was this, her determination to protect her ponies from anything that threatened them, that lent her the strength to go on. She wanted little more than to run away and cry and perhaps even end her immortal life, but what good would that do? None at all. For a very long time, she had lived for the good of others, and she wasn’t about to stop now.
But things would be different if they survived, she had vowed. Before this ruin had come, she had believed ardently in the right and ability of ponies to make their own decisions in every aspect of their lives. She had trusted that her subjects could handle most parts of their lives on their own far better than some distant ruler could. So history had taught her. It was, after all, the firm conviction that they were better than everypony else in every way and so entitled to make all of life’s decisions for them that had ultimately brought down the old Alicorn Hegemony, of which she and Luna were the very last descendants.
Perhaps she had been too set in her ways. That was a flaw that all immortals, to some degree or another, possessed. The cold, hard reality was that tens of thousands of her subjects, at the very least, had chosen to use the freedom she had given them to turn to the worship of daemon gods and plunge Equestria into the most devastating and horrific war it had ever known. That she would need to take a much firmer approach to controlling her subjects when this was over was obvious. She already had some ideas on what might be done…
…
In a patch of ivy on the edge of the Great Western Forrest, a purple unicorn stirred. Twilight Sparkle blearily cracked open her tired eyes and looked up at the sun overhead. It looked to be around midday, though she hadn’t the foggiest idea of how long she’d been asleep. Her body still ached, but less than before. More importantly, she wasn’t waking up to find some monsters in her face. A better start than last time, she thought.
Slowly, painfully, Twilight forced her unwilling body to rise to its hooves. Her joints and muscles burned with a dull ache as she stretched, feeling the crackles and pops as her body roused itself. Her jaw was swollen now, and badly. She could barely force it to open at all. Her growling stomach and hunger pangs told her that this couldn’t be allowed.
“Only one thing to do,” Twilight thought.
She took several long, deep breathes as she cleared her mind in preparation. Her horn glowed purple as she telekinetically grasped her own jaw. She took one last deep breath, closed her eyes, and yanked.
Twilight tried not to scream, she really did. But the pain of having jaw pop back into place through such sensitive, swollen tissue was just too much. She let out a cry of agony that could be heard for miles as she writhed on the ground.
At length, the blinding pain receded to a dull ache to match the rest of her body. Twilight slowly regained her hooves and wiped the tears from her cheeks. Slowly, carefully, she opened and closed her jaw a handful of times, until she was reasonably certain it was working correctly. With a clinical eye, she looked at the forest around her until she settled back on the ivy patch she had rested in. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but her biology studies told her that this plant should prove edible, and it was better than going hungry.
The light green ivy proved to taste like raw sewage, but it was filling. Twilight’s hunger subsided after only a few minutes of consuming the revolting stuff. She sat back on her haunches, wishing for all the world she had something to drink, or anything really to remove the foul taste from her tongue.
Now that her most immediate problems had been solved, Twilight allowed her mind to think on what to do next. The guilt she had been feeling last night crashed into her like a bombshell. She’d abandoned so many ponies back in Manehatten. Rainbow Dash, Applejack, Cadance, the Royal Guard…
“What am I doing? I can’t just leave them! They’re my friends! What would Celestia say if she saw me slinking back to her with all my friends in the hooves of those… those… monsters!”
Twilight looked back the way she had come, a sense of stoic determination filling her up.
“Come Tartarus or high water, Twilight Sparkle is not leaving her friends to die!”