"MY SPINE!"
I snapped my head over to the merc with a longsword and an army helmet, who now had a sharp piece of ice lodged in his spine. I looked up to the ceiling to see a hundred floating crystals of ice, ready to drop on my head. Taking my foot off the heavy's throat, I jumped backwards away from the griffins. The ice struck as soon as I was out of the drop zone, impaling the mercs, alive or dead, a hundred times over. I looked around the room to find the source of the attack, seeing a teal glow from behind the bar. I vaulted over it, a levitation spell being broken by my helmet as I landed lightly in front of a unicorn and held my sword to his throat.
He had hazel eyes, a cool blue coat, deep blue mane and tail, a lean build, and a marking on his flank of a tidal wave and a wolf's head. He looked behind me and smirked as his horn glowed.
'He's just trying to get me to look away so he can get the jump on me. I heard a cracking from behind me, but stayed focused on what I was doing. A loud crash finally got my attention as I looked behind me to see that the wall had broken open and-
"Three hundred seventy two thousand eight hundred forty five pancakes incoming!" GLaDOS shouted, stating the obvious fact that there was a massive cloud of fresh, hot pancakes floating in from the kitchen. I vaulted over the bar again, then dashed out through the burning hole in the wall with the pancakes following close behind. The pancakes dropped just as I reached Ditzy and Spike, burying all but our heads under a mountain of cooked breakfast goods.
I groaned, pulling a singular arm free. "Once I've taken care of my brother, I will wage war on..."
A dramatic DUN DUN DUN from nowhere sounded.
"Pancakes!" I ground my teeth together as a sharp pain in my stomach made itself known, before the area went numb.
3 minutes later.
"Well, well, well, what do we have here?" The blue unicorn from behind the bar walked around the pile, a smug grin dominating the lower portion of his face.
Darkness pulled at the edges of my vision as I looked up at him.
"Most likely internal bleeding-" I coughed, causing a stabbing feeling in my abdomen and spraying droplets of blood across the display inside my helmet. "Yep, definitely internal bleeding." I said as the darkness enveloped the world around me.
"--What happened to hi--" A voice echoed.
"-- impaled on his own--" another voice said.
"--FIX--"
"--I'll try!--"
"--the hilt is in his stom--"
Then everything went quiet.
I was floating in a dark void, the emptiness comforting me. I reached and rooted around in my own mind, finding memories and emotions, some mine, most not.
I found a memory of my time as a human and entered it.
230 YEARS AGO
I stood next to a couch, still my dragon self. My human self sat on the couch, leaning forward and rapidly tapping buttons, moving thumb sticks, and pulling triggers. On the screen was a game, just a generic military shooter. I sat down beside my former self, who seemed not to notice me. Something didn't feel quite right. It just didn't seem... natural to see myself like that. I couldn't shake the feeling of wrongness about this scene, so I turned to a different one of my memories. A darker memory.
14 YEARS AGO
I appeared in a dimly lit cave, looking out of a small opening. Really, the word cave didn't do it justice. It was more of a 'giant vault'. To put it in perspective, it was like looking from the perspective of an average sized cat. I was my baby self, only seven years old, hiding inside of the firing chamber of a massive gun. Outside, a battle raged between a legion of griffins plus one alicorn and a massive female dovah, covered head to toe in porcelain white armor and armed to the teeth with all manner of guns, rockets, blades, and lasers. Tiny hands pressed against ears did nothing to drown out the sounds of explosions, gunfire, and screams coming from the outside. All of the sudden, every thing went silent.
Luna watched from afar the procession of the battle. The white dragon had done an admirable job defending her home, but she was on her last leg. The few remaining griffin forces were taking cover behind boulders as Caroline recovered from their last attack. A hundred gashes and stabs, she could handle. A severed wing? She could live without it. A throat? That was something that she needed. Her armor was quick to automatically patch the wound, but that was only temporary. Stimpacks injected into her bloodstream for the hundredth time that day, and they were gratefully received. The once great queen stood to her full height, dwarfing any living being nearby. Celestia descended from the clouds, her golden armor shining out and catching the attention of the only other royalty in the area that wasn't skeletonized.
"The Burning Queen... I should have known you'd find once I opened the vault again." The queen rasped, her once silken voice reduced to what sounded like an eighty five year old human that smokes six packs of cigarettes a day.
"Queen of dovahs, I have judged you and your kind to be a major threat to my kingdom. What say you in your defense?" The queen paused for a moment, considering what the Burning Queen had just said to her.
"WE ARE THE THREAT?! YOU DRIVE OUR SPECIES TO THE BRINK OF EXTINCTION AND YOU CALL US THE-" The queen was cut off by a bright flash and a boom. When Luna's eyes readjusted, the queen had been completely stripped to the bone of any and all flesh, obviously dead. Her skeletal remains, plus armor, dropped to the ground, raising a plume of dust. The griffins stalked past her, and into the vault as Celestia simply glided in.
"Find the eggs, then we leave." She commanded. The griffins spread out in a search pattern. Luna sensed that the dreamer was in strife, so she assumed a gaseous form and slithered along until she found where they were hiding. In front of her was a massive machine with a large rectangular piece and a long cylindrical one coming out of the side. In the machine, Luna sensed, was the dreamer in question. There was a slit where she could see into the small place that the subject was in. She solidified and peeked through the slat. Inside of the dark room she could clearly see a baby dragon, shivering in fear. Perks of being the goddess of night.
"Ahem... Uh... there, there, everything is going to be okay." She said in her best motherly voice. The baby dragon looked up and jumped at the sight of her, backing further into a corner.
Realizing that he probably wouldn't be too friendly with an alicorn, after just reliving his mother being killed by one, she changed her form to that of a blue baby dragon with eyes like a starry night. She opened the sliding door and climbed in, looking to Drake who, instead of quaking with fear, was now looking at her curiously.
I shivered inside the firing chamber of the gun after witnessing my mother's death again in my dreams. Suddenly a dark figure blotted out the light from outside, leaving me with nothing but my eyes for illumination. It mumbled something then disappeared. The breach opened. This was new. A blue baby dragon climbed in, the breach closing behind her. She had light blue scales and her eyes were filled with stars and galaxies. I cocked my head to the side in curiosity, wondering what was going on.
"What is your name?" She asked.
"My name is Loki. What's yours?"
" I am Luna. You are experiencing a nightmare, and I will end it for you, to bring you more pleasant dreams." I blinked. The death scene was gone, instead replaced by the dark void, though now I was my usual self. Still in front of me, Luna's eyes widened for a second before she returned to her usual composure. She grabbed my claw for a second before letting go. "I will find you in reality. Now awaken."
I jerked awake, bolting upright. I soon regretted it. I looked down at my stomach to see a bloody, luminescent blue mess of jagged tears and rends. I eased myself back down, feeling the hole both in myself and in the bed I was currently laying in. I looked around the room to see Ditzy sleeping in a nearby chair, snoring quietly.
"Uh, hello?" I called, hoping I wasn't about to become a Rick from the Walking Dead.
"One sec!" A muffled voice from outside the room called. The doors opened, revealing the blue pony from before and my little brother.
"You!" I shouted as loud as I could, which wasn't exactly the loudest I had ever spoken.
"Yes, me. I've been trying to fix you up all night, but it hasn't exactly gone very well."
"Why not?"
"Well, I know absolutely nothing about your biology, and anytime I tried to stitch you up the stitches got burnt away by your blood."
"Yeah, what's up with that, anyway?" He asked, clearly uninformed.
"Yours isn't?" Spike asked, but the pony steered the conversation away from the topic.
"Anyways, you have a very important visitor!" He exclaimed in an almost giddy fashion. He trotted back to the door. "He is ready to be visited." He shouted into the next room which, by the sound of things, had stopped being on fire.
A new figure strode into the room with royal poise. A tall dark blue pony with both wings and horn walked into the room. Her chest and hooves were covered by jet black pieces of armor, the chest piece bearing a crescent moon insignia. Her mane was filled with stars and when our gazes met, I knew who I was talking to, though a feeling of dread filled me when Spike and Hydra Wolf bowed to her.
"Luna?"
"Loki."