The Brightest Shine

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Steady was already up and moving towards the bunk area where the tents were pitched.
“We have to go. Now.” He gave a complicated, piercing whistle, loud enough to make Shining flinch as her ears laid back, and within thirty seconds Flare, Sand Storm and Squall had landed in front of them.
“Grab a lifting harness and fit her up now. We have to make an emergency run to the front.”

The order was followed, and in under a minute, Shining Mind found herself stuffed into a harness and rocketing up through the sky into the darkness. The sun had moved on hours ago and taken its' bubble of good weather with it, leaving behind a low ceiling of black clouds that were only barely visible in the light of the camp fires below.
For the past week, the night teams had been waiting for daybreak to pack up and take to the air, for while every pegasus soldier carried a simple map and magnetic compass, navigating by them was difficult enough during the daylight; at night it was nearly impossible. When working in units, specialized (heavy) navigation equipment made the job possible, with the rest maintaining position with whistled commands, but as the camp lights disappeared beneath them, Steady gambled that Shining would prove worth her weight.

“Shining!” Steady shouted over the wind rush, “We need you to guide us to the sun! Can you do that?”

The unicorn looked startled, then realized the point of the question and concentrated. A dim glow formed around her horn, growing brighter and brighter until, with a brilliant flash, it formed a nearly solid beam of blinding purple light that illuminated everything around them, stretching out into the distance and disappearing into the clouds.

All four startled pegasi looked at the unicorn suspended between them, her eyes still closed in concentration, but now with a wry smile on her face.
“What? I could never keep track of my keys.”

With a collective shake of their heads, they moved on, gathering speed as they followed the beacon onward into the night. The sun wasn't very fast, but it had more than a two-hour head start on them, and the plans for tonight’s new tactics worried Steady even more. Their previous hunts had never allowed the demons anywhere near the sun, but this night, with the sun rising out of a valley and being attacked from all sides, an accident was now frighteningly possible.

After only half an hours flight north east, the rumble of ethereal hooves on the sky became audible over the wind rushing though their manes, and soon the pegasi began to catch glimpses of movement deeper in the clouds with the light of their purple beacon.

“We must be getting close now!” Flare yelled over the rushing wind. “Shining, does that thing-” she pointed at the glowing beam, “go over walls?”

Steady hadn't thought of that, and with a start he realized that every whistled call he had heard so far had been from above.
“Climb!”

The five began to rise sharply, and within moments, a huge spire of snow covered rock whipped past on their right. They diverted even more of their speed upward until they were flying almost straight up, yet the air around them seemed to be slowing down, rising with them up into the sky. As the soup around them began to brighten rapidly, they suddenly understood why.

In an instant they had cleared the edge of the valley, bursting up into the clear skies and turbulent rising air coming off the sun. As their eyes adjusted to the blinding light after so long in the clouds, Steady squinted down and nearly quit breathing.

Below them, the entire valley floor was smoking and boiling as a year's worth of mountain snow melted off in minutes, washing island rafts of forests the size of city blocks down the mountainside, burning as they went. The air trapped between the mountains gusted and churned like a pot of boiling water, and the two pegasi lifting the sun were fighting to stay aloft.

A crater a mile across, that's what Shining had said. If they turned and ran right now they might be able to put enough mountain between them and the explosion to live...
Steady dismissed the thought.
“Land, now!” He yelled, picking out a precarious looking spot on the mountain stone below. “Shining, I need you to show us where the two saddles are!” He shouted over the calamitous noise from below and over the wind roar that surrounded them.” Squall, Sand Storm, you need to find the broken saddles and get them back to Shining right now! You can repair them, right?”

Shining looked like she wanted to object, but one glance at the sun, swinging wildly between the two pegasi, made her blanch and simply nod.

Steady took wing once more and was off, streaking towards the two mirror bubbles that shielded the two carrier pegasi. The noise deeper in the valley was deafening, and a few attempts showed that even whistled commands wouldn't work. Turning over in midair, he shot up and around, using the shadow cast overhead by the carriers to let him get closer despite the burning heat.
It worked. The two mirror balls seemed to start as the ponies inside looked up, then gratefully heeded the order and began to climb south west, up over the valley wall. The air began to calm somewhat as they gained altitude, and as the sun broke over the valley wall, the icy screech of the demons was music to their ears.

The small bubble of clear air that had been trapped in the valley began to rapidly expand, scorching and boiling off cloud and demon alike, and setting up a whole new set of violent currents and updrafts. There was no whistle command for 'Don't cross the suspension beams', so Steady settled for 'keep your distance'.

It wasn't enough. As he watched from above, the violent air threw one of the carriers left and down into the other's beam, and a bolt of lightning seemed to jump between the beams and saddles with an electric 'SNAP!' loud enough to be heard even over the roar around them.

Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Below him, the two carrier pegasi threw up their front hooves to protect their faces as their saddles failed and the mirror bubbles winked out. The sun dropped toward the outer wall of the valley, and Steady had just enough time to feel grateful that half the tribe would still survive back at the camp.

Curiously, the sun seemed to dim as it fell, its blinding light fading rapidly to a soft glow.

The sun disappeared into a snow bank, and like a switch being thrown, it was the black of midnight once more.

Suddenly finding himself hovering in black empty space, he wondered for a moment if he was dead.
It was the howling of the demons and the frantic whistled commands in the distance that convinced him otherwise.
Dropping carefully towards the ground, Steady ignored the chaos, lit his military issue lamp, a dim green affair that worked by mixing two liquids, and eventually landed on the ground near the spot where the sun had gone down.

Above him, he could hear the windigos closing in from all sides, so outnumbering the caroling pegasi as to overwhelm them. From the sound of it, all order had broken down.

The tiny pool of green light from his lamp stick was suddenly outshone by a familiar beam of bright purple light coming from up the hill, and withing a minute, Flare and Shining came trotting into view looking very confused.

“What do you mean 'what did I do'? What did you do?! I thought you said it would explode if we ever dropped it!”

“It should have!” Shining replied, wide eyed, “How in Tartarus are we still here?!”

Steady took a deep shuddering breath and exhaled slowly, trying to clear his mind.
“I have no idea, but I'm not complaining. We need to get everyone back together before this rout-” he gestured up at the howling, churning blackness overhead, “gets any worse. Can you give us a some kind of beacon to home in on?”

“What do I look like, a signal fire?!” Shining asked indignantly, “Finding my keys is one thing, but I don't know any spell for that!”

One of the demons swung low enough to pass a few feet over their heads, and all three ducked as the biting cold pressed down on them.

“Well, do something, will you?!” Flare shouted angrily at her, “We can fly by night with a full moon in good weather, but trying to navigate in this soup is just nuts! If we can't pull everyone back together...”

Shining thought briefly, then closed her eyes and as they watched, first one, then two, and finally four beams shot from her horn into different parts of the blackness overhead.
“That's all four saddles.”

About a minute later, somepony did. The crunch of gravel on landing announced the presence of one saddle pegasus and a certain very angry Commander.

“Commander Hurricane!” Flare blurted out as she scrambled to attention with Steady.

“We've lost the sun commander. It turns out that crossing the suspension beams cancels them out, and after we lost the first two ponies, they couldn't hold it together.”

Hurricane wheeled on the gray unicorn behind her.
“You thought you could keep this a secret from us?!”

“NO!” Shining Mind shouted back, “I told all the soldiers that you sent me not to cross the beams! But somepony couldn't spare the time for proper training!”

The commander looked furious, but whatever she was trying to say next was interrupted as another windigo swooped down at them from above. Hurricane spun around and delivered a mighty kick through the face, her hind legs and haunches freezing up as the demon screamed and dissolved into a cloud of mist.

“Well, fi-fi-fix it!” Hurricane growled through suddenly chattering teeth as she gestured to the many holes melted into the snow bank where the pieces of the sun had fallen.

“Are you out of your damn mind?!” Shining shouted back, completely oblivious to the black, churning, howling vortex overhead, “It takes at least three unicorns a day to light the sun, and that's assuming it's still working! You idiots just dropped my work into a bucking snow bank!”

Squall and another carrier pegasus crunched down beside her as she spoke, and as more of her attention strayed from the beacon, the last beam of light channeled from her horn dimmed and took on a distinct red tinge.

“Do you have any idea how long it will take to repair a cold shock this severe?!” She continued, jabbing a hoof at the snow bank. “I'll bet all thirty-eight parts have cracks and flaws now, and repairing even one can be a day-long job!”

“Of course not! I just need a few months to repair it, then it'll be good as new!”

Hurricane's rage seemed to peak as she glared at Shining, but after a long moment's tension, a slow smile spread across her face. A moment later she actually laughed.
“So be it. We've wiped out at least nine out of ten demons by now, and though they'll take their toll on us tonight, they won't be back for at least a generation. Our job here is done.” She stuck out a hoof, and a confused Shining Mind reflexively reached out and shook it. “Thank you, good unicorn, for your service to the pegasi tribe. Your ingenuity has driven off the winter and given us back control of both our homelands.”

Shining was having trouble catching up, but Steady could see she wasn't happy about that last statement.
“Wait, what-”

“Soldiers, we have about half an hour until this place turns back into a frozen wasteland, so drop the saddles, it's time we were on our way home.”

With a wing beat strong enough to throw gravel into the air, Commander Hurricane was gone, and with barely a backwards glance, the two remaining carrier ponies dumped their saddles in a heap and took off into the churning black storm clouds overhead from which a light snow was already falling.

Flare and Squall shared an uneasy look as a Shining stood with her mouth hanging open, staring at the place were Hurricane had been just a moment ago. The roaring and howling of the snow storm overhead seemed even louder in the sudden silence, and the last red remnants of the beacon from Shining's horn seemed to fade away to nothing as it all sunk in. She slowly turned to look at the three pegasi with wide eyes as she realized how many hundreds of miles north of the last settlement she was, and for the first time since they had met, Steady saw fear in her eyes.

Before anyone could respond, a golden brown streak blundered out of the sky and bowled her offer her hooves, sending up a spray of gravel into the blowing snow.
“Oh... OW!...” Sand Storm winced as he got to his hooves, “I got the saddle; why did you switch off the beacon?!”

Steady shook his head to clear it.
“It's a long story,” he stated flatly as he picked up one saddle from the ground and began buckling it on. “You and Squall are going to help Shining fish out all the pieces from that snow bank and then we are all getting the buck out of here. Flare; you take that last saddle.”

Squall, Flare and Shining all breathed a sigh of relief as they set to work, though Sand Storm grumbled a bit. Flare mouthed a silent 'Thank you!' to her commander before brushing the new snow off and putting her own saddle on to join them.
Half an hour later they had found all the parts, divided them between themselves, and Steady had strapped Shining carefully back into the lifting harness. The flight back was even more harrowing than the frantic dash out had been, as the remaining windigos harassed them with white out conditions all the way, and by the time the five of them touched down, they were all half frozen and the snow was already knee high.

The purple beacon Shining had used to guide them ended at the mouth of a large cave at the edge of the mountain plateau where a very upset Spec was waiting for them.
“Where have you been? We were worried sick!”

Shining tried to explain, but by now her teeth were chattering so hard she was having difficulty just standing up. The Pegasi were doing somewhat better for their military training, but after being awake and on duty for nearly two days straight, they were all badly in need of rest.

“There's been a change of plans.” Steady said simply as he dropped his load of obsidian stones on the ground.

“You broke it?! You bucking broke the sun!?” Spec shouted from the verge of hysterics.

Pie and Verdant had come back to the mouth of the cave by now, and from the looks on their faces, it was clear they weren't happy either. As Pie tried to find the words, it was Verdant who stated the obvious.
“But... we're so far from the last pony settlement... Even the Griffons don't live this far north... Without the sun...” She trailed off, looking fixedly at the pegasi's wings. She glanced at her own bare back and seemed to shrink in on herself as her situation became apparent.

“And where did everypony else go?!” Spec continued, “An hour ago they all just grabbed whatever they could carry and flew off! What's going on!?”

Steady held out a hoof for silence, and amazingly, Spec actually stopped.
“The rest of the pegasi tribe is on their way home. Commander Hurricane's job is finished and they're done here. My unit and I have been on the wing for almost two days without rest, and are in no shape to join them, so we need a place to sleep. I see you've found yourself a cave. How large is it?”

Spec and Verdant stared at him, mouths open, and Sand Storm seemed to perk up at the news. After a moment, it was Pie who answered.

“It's big enough for two ponies at the shoulder, at least for a while, but it hasn't been exposed to the elements in a long time. The avalanches cleared the mouth here, but I don't know how far down it goes.

Steady wearily shook the snow off his coat and pointed to a couple of large baskets that could still be seen sticking out of the snow.
“That's good enough for me. You three; get as many of these supplies into the cave as you can, they're useless to us if they wind up buried in snow. The rest of you; grab your sleeping gear and lets get inside. It's been a very long day.”

As the four pegasi went to dig their sleeping bags out of the snow and the unicorns grudgingly set to work loading the supplies, only Shining remained still, staring in wide eyed terror at the claustrophobic mouth of the cave.

As she processed his words, a feeling of dread crept over her as all the implications of this made themselves apparent:
'They really don't know.' She thought, 'It's just a matter of time until they make a mistake and destroy everything! They might even think I kept it a secret on purpose... Not that it will matter if we're all dead. How can I fix this?! How can-'

She followed Steady as he trotted quickly towards the camp and stopped to pull a large sack out of a box with a large red plus sign on it. Moments later, the other three pegasi landed next to him.

“Grab a lifting harness and fit her up, now. We have to make an emergency run to the front.”

The three ponies descended on her, unfolding the sack and rudely shoving each hoof through it's matching hole so that she found herself wrapped in something half way between a corset and a hanging basket. A grope in a particularly sensitive area made her straighten sharply and look behind her to find Flare giving her a quizzical look. The glare she gave the orange maned pony could have reduced a building to ash, but Flare just gave her a disappointed look before taking to the air with the last lifting rope.

The next moment, her hooves left the ground and she was rocketing up into the low hanging black clouds. She realized before they did that they needed her help to find the sun, and the shocked silence when she used her key finding spell (turned up to 11,) was very gratifying. Before long she could feel they were getting close, and after a near shave with a mountain top, the five of them flew straight up over the mountain side and into the clear air above the cataclysm unfolding in the valley.

She could only stare. Below her the mountain side burned as pine forests, here since time beyond measure, dried out and burst into flames sending up choking smoke as hundred-foot giants were reduced to ash. The snow cover built up over the last year was melting off all at once, sending huge avalanches of snow and torrents of icy water charging down the hillsides, sometimes with enough violence to tear the burning trees loose and send them tumbling down the mountainside like a foal's toothpick forest caught in a garden hose. The thunderous noise was beyond anything she had ever imagined, and suspended over it all was her work.

The machine that wrought this destruction, that was turning a verdant valley into a gravel pit, this was her work. The feeling of fierce pride was so strong that she could ignore all the nagging doubts. It took a moment for her to understand what Steady was yelling at her.

“Shining, I need you to show us where the two saddles are! You can repair them, right?”

'Saddles? Repair?' She thought, and for the first time she really looked at the two ponies holding up the sun. 'Two...'
She could feel the hairs on the back of her neck standing up as the realization hit her. A quick mental calculation on the weight of the sun vs the lifting capacity of even two large pegasi gave an alarmingly slim safety margin. It had taken hours to activate the saddles, but if she didn't get them fixed and fast, then her work would very definitively be the death of them all. As all the doubts and fears rushed back to the forefront of her mind, she grimaced, and nodded, lighting her horn and sending out the beacon call to the two missing saddles.

The commander that had brought them all here took off and flew straight for the sun, probably trying to warn them, though what good it would do at this point she didn't know. The fear of imminent annihilation was a strange one; a part of her was kicking herself for not putting in some kind of safety feature when they still had the chance, while another wondered if she would feel anything if it did fall. This led to a complicated calculation involving blast waves, speed of nerve transmission, and ended with the conclusion that no one within a mile would ever know what happened.

The sun was moving again. Beside her, Flare gave a triumphant yell as it began to rise and track towards them, its' rays bursting over the edge of the valley and setting off a chorus of howls from the windigo herds caught too close. She was almost starting to breathe when the wind picked up again, throwing the two lifting pegasi together. She watched their mirror shields pop like bubbles as the saddles shorted out and the sun fell.

All light stopped. The sudden darkness was complete, the sun had fallen, but after a moment's reflection, she was still here. 'What? How?! How am I-' The thought was cut off as she slowly registered that somepony was hugging her tightly and had their head buried in her mane. She looked down and gently lit her horn for some light, to find that Flare was in fact snuggling her, her eyes still clamped shut against the coming fire.

Maybe it was the whole not being dead thing, but Shining found she wasn't really mad, and settled for clearing her throat forcefully, then waiting for the embarrassed mare to let go.

“Um... sorry about that.” Flare muttered, before she thought for a moment, then asked accusingly, “Hey, aren't we supposed to be dead?”

Flare looked around her at the small circle of rock visible in the light of Shining's horn.
“I may not be the brightest lamp in the hall, but I'm pretty sure we're still on the mountainside.”

Flare was now giving her a dirty look.
“Okay, so what the heck happened just now?”

Shining had already lit her homing beacon spell and begun following the purple beam over the hilltop.

While it was impossible to tell in the blackness, Shining could feel the warm clear air overhead rising away, pulling in the frigid black storm clouds. As the noise behind them died away over the curve of the valley wall, the howling overhead intensified, punctuated here and their by frantic whistled commands as the pegasi found the tide of the battle suddenly turning against them. In under a minute her purple beacon led them over a small rise to a snow bank where Steady Hoof was already waiting. Her rage at seeing her work in such a state was such that she hardly remembered the yelling match that followed, that is until their Commander finished with: “given us back control of both our homelands.”

It was as if the floor had just fallen away under her. She and her sun had served their purpose, and now they were going to be left to find their own way home if they could, or much more likely, to freeze to death in this wasteland. Her own tribe had already abandoned her. If they could...

The next thing she knew she was tumbling across the ground with some soldier pony who had lost his way in the clouds. He muttered something she didn't hear, but despite the blow to the head and over the ringing in her ears she heard Steady come to her aid. They even helped her pick up the pieces of the broken sun and carry them back!

He had helped her. More than that, he had saved her life, not allowing the others to just leave her to die
in the snow, and the careful way he had helped her back into the lifting harness...

Shining had little experience with romance; her choice of education and career hadn't made things easy, and a near obsessive interest in whatever project she found herself working on had discouraged most admirers. The few times she had felt something for another pony, the feeling hadn't been mutual, and after a few embarrassing attempts, she had more or less given herself to her work, reasoning that love would come in its own time.

Of course, she had never dreamed the pony might be a pegasus. The tribes tolerated each other at best, but intermarriage was extremely rare. Of course one heard the stories about flings of passion, or Eps used for more than manual labor, but what she was starting to feel for Steady... It didn't fit in either of those categories. What little time she had devoted to dreams always featured a devoted husband who shared her interests and who's own passions she could find joy in. Would Steady be willing to study the sciences with her? Could she enjoy... what was it that he liked to do?

Her thoughts were interrupted as they touched down at the snow covered camp, and her cold stiff legs nearly gave out underneath her. Spec and Pie had questions of course, but Steady soon had everyone working together gathering supplies and loading them... into the cave.

In less than a minute the pegasi had all disappeared through the cave entrance, while Pie, Spec and the Ep busied themselves digging the supplies out of the snow and carrying them into the cave. Just looking at the black opening of the tiny space was making it hard to breathe, and despite the freezing cold and blowing snow, staying outside suddenly looked very attractive.

She jumped about a foot in the air as Spec emerged for another load.
“Yes! Loading supplies! Um... How about I dig out the supplies and bring them to the entrance for you?”

Pie gave her a concerned glance, but as the icy wind picked up speed she didn't argue. That bought perhaps half an hour of work, lifting heavy baskets of supplies and bringing them to the cave with the Ep, but soon Spec told her to stop.

“We've filled this place for nearly two hundred paces; it's too cramped and we can't fit any more in here tonight. Just leave the rest for morning and come on in, Verdant's already set up your sleeping bag.”

The darkness of the cave mouth seemed to be closing in and tightening around her throat making her pant for breath, and she took several steps back as she answered.
“But- There must be more to do! I... We haven't moved everything in yet!”

“And we don't need to. Come on Shining, its well below freezing out there, you have to come in.”

Her teeth were already chattering badly, but she clenched her jaws and managed to protest.
“But... But... I'm not cold yet! I... um...”

Spec was really looking worried by now.
“Shining, you can't stay out here all night; You'll freeze. Besides, we need to close up the entrance to keep out the cold.”

Shining shook her head violently.
“NO!... I mean... No, you... you go get some sleep. I... I have work! Work that I need to do! I'll be in in a just a little bit!” And before Spec could protest, Shining wedged a big basket of supplies into the open mouth of the cave and packed snow tightly around it with her magic. After a moment to make sure Spec had left, Shining wiped her brow and sat down hard in the snow.

'Crap!' Shining thought to herself 'Now what?! I'm freezing my tail off out here, but that tiny cave...' She shivered all over from the terror as much as the numbing cold. 'Come on Shining, you're a physicist. You have to stay moving to stay warm; What can you do until morning?'

As the idea came to her, she managed a chattery smile and set to work, scooping up snow and compacting the big wet flakes into large blocks by squeezing them hard with her magic.
'It has to be big enough to sleep in... Come on, you can do this...'
The black hours of night slipped by as block after block was formed from the snow covered ground and hoisted into place. Several times the claustrophobic panic threatened her, and she stopped to pushed the walls further apart, and as the supplies started to come in she was forced to do this several more times, but eventually the base was set and the walls spiraled up to meet at the top of the dome.

The darkness still showed no sign of lifting anytime soon, and the cold and exhaustion were beginning to catch up with her, even her best efforts, while tolerable, felt too small and cold to let her sleep.

Hours of hard work later she staggered into the igloo for a snack when the basket at the mouth of the cave shifted and was pushed out, releasing a surprising amount of warm air that shimmered in the light of her horn. Pie looked concerned as she approached.

Pie gave her another worried look, glanced around the igloo, looked even more worried, and began digging through a basket of medical supplies. A moment later she came back with some strange smelling dried fruit.

The food seemed to sway slightly in front of her, but then so did everything else. She took a mouthful and smiled at the pleasant taste.

The Brightest Shine

by Cozy Mark IV

Ch. 4 Lest Darkness Fall