//------------------------------// // Chapter 2: Machinations of Night // Story: In the Shadow of a Special Day // by preaplanes //------------------------------// The battle for Canterlot raged in the streets as the citizens of the proud city panicked and fled for their lives. The Elements of Harmony and princess of the sun were doing their part as best they could. The battle wasn't going well, but Princess Luna wasn't worried. She stalked the halls of Cantelot Castle as if some great horror incarnate, preying upon any changeling foolish enough to venture through the castle beyond where its swarm had control. It was quite thrilling, acting the part of the huntress in the night. So far, though, all this huntress had found was small game. She had effortlessly taken down seventeen of these creatures with a sleeping spell, a very easy spell for the princess of the night in particular, and was now carrying a group of three into yet another vacant room. Though Luna hated to admit it, sleep was well within her sphere of influence. As she roamed the halls, a large Pegasus stallion landed next to her, wearing the armor of her royal guard. A pair of thin, hairless scars ran down his coat from his neck “Ah, I found you, Princess,” he said, trying to hide the relieved feeling he had now that he knew she was still all right. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he was trying to hide the worry that he had moments before that she might not have been. Luna chucked. “Yes, it seems you have, captain. I must be terribly rusty after a thousand years,” she teased. “Do you have something to report, or did you simply pick the worst possible time to play hide and seek?” The stallion saluted, not letting her jests get to him. “The assassin has been thoroughly secured and is now ready for questioning.” Luna looked aronud her for any additional foes quickly before replying, “Very well, Midnight Cloak, I'll go down right now. You watch these corridors for any changelings. You know the drill.” “Stick to the shadows, and let the Solar Guard stand in their spotlights,” he recited, “strike from behind the lines”. It was a simple philosophy for battle, and one he felt strongly about. Prevent the enemy from getting a foothold behind your allies, don't let any main battle catch up to you, don't take risks and make each move count, and hit the enemy where and when they least expect it; where they are most vulnerable. It was a code he admired, and in a way it became a part of him. Luna smiled. “Glad to see my captain is still as sharp as ever.” she praised. “Now make sure you're aiming at the right targets, changelings are tricky and there are ponies who have run into the depths of the castle for safety.” “Funny how ponies who are afraid of the dark run into it for protection,” he mused grimly. “You have no idea,” the princess deadpanned, rolling her eyes and leaving the area in the capable hooves of her captain. The Lunar Guard was her own force, each member hoof picked and given the option to join or not. They came from many walks of life. A couple were bodyguards, and indeed, most ponies thought that all the Lunar Guard was for was her personal protection. A couple more were former Solar Royal Guards, catching her attention by the way they conducted themselves, the approval from their paladin-like superiors being arbitrary at best in her decision. Some were thieves, former criminals of various backgrounds, various motives, and various levels of theft; they would ply their guile to their trade, using the cover of Luna's night to aid them. One was a cartographer: an adventurer of sorts, making her living traveling the world and abandoning all fear, delving into dark, ancient and forbidden regions to bring back knowledge of the world both technical and personal back home with her, and all the wonders that she had seen. The Lunar Guard was a symbol of her status. The “Royal Guard” was actually comprised of two separate groups, the Solar Guard and the newly re-established Lunar Guard. Few ponies realized this, referring to the Solar Guard and Royal Guard synonymously. At the head of the Solar Guard was Shining Armor, the older brother to the Element of Magic, wielder of powerful barrier magic, and whose mess they were currently attempting to clean up. No, “clean up” would imply that the mess was getting smaller. Perhaps it would be better to say “stem the tide of” for now. Luna frowned at this thought, but she trusted her sister and her guard. She trusted Twilight Sparkle and the other Elements of Harmony. And most of all, she trusted in the strength of good ponies to overcome any foe. Still, things were getting worse before they were getting better. With that thought out of the way, her thoughts ran once again to her Lunar Guard. Midnight Cloak was her captain, and he had yet to let her down. He was a cunning pony who could always think on his hooves. He was a powerful stallion, his speed in flight for a pegasus of his size being unusually high, so when he performed a flying kick, he hit hard enough that even some of the more prodigious members of the Apple family would be hard pressed to buck with that much power. Even without magic, that kind of kinetic energy left him as one heck of a powerhouse. He couldn't put up a defense for a whole city, no, but that wasn't his job; such a feat would be useless to the Lunar Guard. Above all other things, he proved time and again to be steadfast and loyal to his princess. The princess arrived at the dungeon, where Maria and Fletch were talking calmly, sitting at a wooden table playing tic tac toe on a piece of paper, despite a clearly wounded changeling beside them. Luna raised an eyebrow at this but shrugged, figuring that it didn't really matter. The room was unlike most dungeons she had seen a thousand years past: rather than a gloomy darkness, it was a brightly lit, magically illuminated, almost blindingly white room with twenty equally white rooms sealed with powerful magical barriers, with one larger room at the end of the hallway outfitted with a granite table. All the rooms perfectly square, arranged in such a way that no room could view any other room It wasn't perfectly suited to Luna's tastes for interrogation techniques, buy hey, it was a lot cleaner than what she was used to. Besides, Luna had no intention of getting information today. Maria Breeze, a unicorn, noticed Luna first. “Hey there, Luna! We've got him locked up tighter than a bank vault!” she said chipperly. Luna nodded. Fletch, as usual, winced at the overly personal way that Maria addressed the princess. It didn't particularly bother the starry maned alicorn in this circumstance. Things were tense, but in this room they were out of their element, a more casual tone breaking out from being so exposed. Maria always knew when it was acceptable to dispense with the formalities and when to keep quiet and follow orders. Well, almost always. Maria was an energetic prankster, and possibly the greatest (and least harmful) thief in Equestria. She had originally gotten Luna's attention when, one evening, Discord's statue started moving seemingly on its own. He wasn't cracked, and when Luna noticed that there was no chaotic magic coming from him, she became bemused, and yet amused at the same time. She could definitely sense magic coming from that direction, though. She decided she would let things play out that evening, seeing how things went. The chaos that erupted the following morning would have had Discord himself high hoofing whoever caused it. Celestia was worked into a tizzy and the Solar Guard was running about like they were a mailmare who put on her saddlebags upside down. Luna, meanwhile, was sharing an inside joke with the fledgeling Lunar Guard and enjoying an oh so sweet comeuppance for the strudel incident from that April Foal's day. How Celestia had managed to get that inside the walls she will never know. That evening, Luna was keeping an eye out when, lo and behold, the statue came into view, slowly moving across the ground and placing itself back on the pedestal, still just as frozen as ever. Luna decided to fly down and investigate. Hovering well above the statue, she could hear giggling coming from below, but couldn't identify the source. The first thing that caught her eye was a note on Discord's face. Luna flew down for a closer look. “Look what I found! You know, you should really watch your things a little more carefully. What next, are you going to lose your castle?” Luna reread the note and blinked. The disembodied giggling had stopped and all was quiet, aside from her own wingbeat and her rapidly failing attempts to avoid laughing. She could still sense magic somewhere... about... three feet away and right next to the hedge? Like a spark, Luna suddenly knew exactly what was going on. Luna summoned a bottle of ink to her and splashed it on the spot where the magic was coming from, resulting in several black stains floating in the air. “Got ya” she laughed as the stain panicked. “Oh no, um, look over there!” the feminine sounding stains said, not moving anywhere. Luna eyed the stains. “I guess I didn't get your hooves, did I?” she snickered. The stains sighed. “Oh what's the point? And here I was having so much fun!” A chestnut mare with a cyan mane, covered in ink stains, suddenly appeared. Luna laughed. “I guess we've both got splotches on our flanks now, huh?” The thief just sat there for a second, as if her brain was on overload. Then, suddenly she snapped. The two of them laughed themselves silly for a while afterward. Luna explained that summoning that ink bottle was a very old spell that she made when she was a filly, a way of giving everypony else splotches too so she wouldn't stand out so much. Being an alicorn, it was a lost cause, and she had received quite a scolding afterword. Maria in turn told her about a number of other burglary pranks she had pulled, the most impressive being the one week theft of the Pony Lisa. Luna invited her to join the Lunar Guard that evening, not to mention a royal pardon. Luna walked down the brightly lit room as the two guards began to bicker. She'd be lying if she said she made an effort to tune out the conversation. “Seriously, Maria, stop it, that's the princess you're talking to!” “Oh yeah, owl eye? She's my friend and I'll address her how I want so long as she's comfortable with it.” “I don't care if that's the case, at least do it when nopony else is around, it's disrespectful in public!” “When nopony else is around, huh?.... there, problem solved! Isn't that right, Luna?” Looking over her shoulder, the princess saw Maria sitting at the table alone, an empty chair across from her. “Hey, change me back!” “Make me!” Luna rolled her eyes. “Do as he says, Maria.” “Oh fine,” she said as she relented, turning the stallion visible once more. “Quiet please, I'm about to visit with our... guest.” Luna could clearly see the changeling who called himself “Cocoon” now. Or, rather, she could see herself strapped to a wall by a chain of brilliant white magic that seemed to go through her legs. The princess walked into the room, making a mental note to have a similar room built but with unnerving blacks instead of these suffocating whites. The changeling going nowhere. Cocoon looked up at his hostess, still clearly in pain but definitely in his right mind. He put on a twisted grin. “You won't keep me here for long. I can tell, we're winning” he began to taunt, but as he did so, it was as if the universe itself couldn't help but to bite him in the flank for tempting fate. A massive magenta wall of energy came crashing forth through the wall behind Luna, who reflexively put up a violet barrier. The two fields collided, Luna's shield breaking up as it collided with the larger one. The wall washed over Luna harmlessly while knocking her would be assassin against the wall, and a sickening crunch coming from down the hall. A moment later a cry of disgust and a bout of uproarious laughter came from the other end of the “dungeon”. “For the love of Luna, it's everywhere!” a masculine voice yelled out, clearly revolted. “I don't know, I think most of it is on you!” a feminine voice replied, clearly having a laugh at his expense. Luna knew what that was from the moment it washed over her. She could feel Shining Armor's magic in it, as well as Princess Cadence's. “It seems you're wrong about that. The tide just turned in our favor.” she said to her guest, who groaned with a fresh reminder of his injuries. “Damn you” he said as he spat. Luna was well aware of this ill mannered tendency with defiant detainees and simply stopped the foul liquid in midair. It was all too common, but still a little perturbing to see herself taking such a vulgar action. She flung the stuff back at the changeling and proceeded to talk. “You're very lucky that that was a strong repulsion field and not a solid wall, otherwise I think you might have ended up like... well, whoever that was over there.” she said coldly. This taunt struck a nerve. “I'd guess the vast majority of your comrades were raiding the city, or were at the ceremony and easily knocked through the glass. A few unfortunates such as yourself and, well, you know, were simply knocked violently into the walls” Silence. Luna kept talking. “Normally I'd simply leave you to rot in this stifling little box but a servant of mine insisted that she get to try to talk to you. Have fun.” she said, walking out the door and out of sight of the parasitic creature. At the end of the hall, Maria was helping Fletch wipe a sickly green ichor off of his wings. Luna concentrated her magic for a short while, a piece of her mane curling as if a living black smoke before growing and taking form. It coalesced and a moment later a darkly colored pony in a racing outfit stood before her, trotting off into Cocoon's cell. “Transformation is your greatest defense against interrogation, as it's fairly difficult to watch yourself squirm. But can that be turned against you?” the princess thought. She waited a few moments before retracting her lone doppelganger, a blood curdling scream piercing the air for only a moment before being cut short. The blue mare smiled to herself as she did. “I'll take that as a yes. I've got a plan of attack.” Luna walked over and saw that Fletch was mostly cleaned off, a large green and black splatter in the corner marking the otherwise pristine wall as if somepony had taken the world's largest flyswatter to the world's largest bug. She winced a moment as she remembered the number of changelings she had casually tossed into cold stone rooms in the darkness. She cleared her throat. “Fletch, I want an update on exactly what that barrier did to the changelings, put emphasis on 'where'.” Fletch grinned and saluted, taking off quickly to gather intelligence. Fletch was Luna's best scout. For that matter, Luna was utterly convinced that he was the best scout in the whole of the Royal Guard, if not Equestria. For most of his life, he had been a part of a weather team in Chicacolt over in Fillynois. His specialty was spotting rogue cloud formations all the way at the end of the horizon, even at night during a full moon. This alone would be impressive, but he also had an uncanny precision about him. Feeling lazy one night, Fletch had noticed a few incoming thunderclouds that hadn't been scheduled. This was actually pretty common, the weather teams of Equestria had to deal with uncontrolled weather coming from places like the Everfree Forest fairly regularly. He didn't feel like flying all the way over to them to push them out of the way, and he didn't have the energy to move them on his own. Everypony else was asleep and would be rather cross at waking up to an unscheduled storm. Grumbling to himself as he was about to try anyway, he had a funny idea. He looked out to the clouds. They were still a long ways off. Fletch walked over to a building labeled “Cloud Storage”. To be honest, though, it wasn't really a building so much as a space where stuff floated about. Namely clouds. He looked them over and grabbed himself a small thundercloud and took off high above the city where the thunder wouldn't wake too many ponies up. Fletch looked hard at the approaching clouds in the distance, lining himself up just right, ever so calm, his breathing relaxed. Then, as if by instinct, he kicked the cloud in the side, activating it and sending a bolt of lightning hurtling across the sky towards the offending formation. He squinted for a second, trying to get a good view. Suddenly, the clouds in the distance burst apart, showering their contents beneath them, well out of anypony's way. What a thrilling sight! Fletch whooped and hollered, ecstatic that such a ridiculous idea had worked, congratulating himself on such a success when he looked down and realized that he had just activated a storm cloud off-schedule, though it was a little one. He swiftly flew to the east and tossed the cloud over the giant lake below the city, whistling nervously as he flew back to his post hoping nopony had noticed. But of course, somepony had noticed. A gigantic bolt of lightning lighting up the night sky, and a small trail of rainwater? That's going to stick out. Facing the music, Fletch told his story to his boss. His boss was pretty understanding though, Chicacolt wasn't exactly known for its tame weather. After releasing a statement about the unusual weather, he had decided to call the event a “scatterbrained thunderstorm”, and had said that there may be more like that. Fletch was soon showing the other members of the team how he did it, and soon they were taking out larger thunderstorms with smaller ones regularly. They weren't as accurate as he was, so they took their shots at shorter ranges, but they got the job done. Fletch's ability to see the clouds and hit them at such a great distance got him a nickname, “Owl Eye”. Luna heard tell of this not too long after her return to Equestria. Noticing one night a fairly large thunderstorm over Ponyville down below, she made an offhooved comment about the weather having gotten crazier (though one could guess at just how offhooved one can be while using the Royal Canterlot Voice). One pony nearby chuckled, claiming that that was nothing, just another storm to make up for an off schedule. Luna was a bit curious as to just how odd the weather could be these days, so she listened as the mare described an number of much weirder phenomena. She described the rains in Baltimare and snows in Stalliongrad. And then she mentioned that the teams over in Fillynois seemed to have thrown up their hooves and practically done away with weather schedules, and how their teams would zap storms with other storms. Intrigued at this, Luna looked into the matter, seeming that such an area would be utter chaos. Her news articles soon pointed her to Fletch, with several seemingly sensationalist stories about him, and yet he always seemed to try to shrink away from the spotlight, rarely answering questions. Days later, Fletch received a royal summons to Canterlot, all fares paid in advance. The invitation was written in silver ink on a deep blue paper, silver filigree decorating the borders. He wasn't sure what to make of it. Maybe it was a commendation for his idea, and was going to pay his weight in bits! Of course, even to him this sounded very silly. Was Celestia upset that he had disrupted the typical weather schedules? Maybe she was going to put him on trial. And then banish him to the moon, or he sun! Or lock him up. Or lock him up and then banish him and his cage to the moon. One way or another, there was no chance he was going to run away from royalty. When he arrived, much to his surprise there sat not Celestia, but her sister. He had heard of her return, and of her supposed redemption, but he was still more than a little unnerved. In those first few moments, he would've much rather faced an angry Celestia. Every foal knows the story of Nightmare Moon, once a year her tales were used to frighten them on Nightmare Night. Luna instead simply said that she wanted a demonstration of his abilities. She had pulled some strings and gotten a lone thundercloud far off in the distance, while the rest of the sky was clear and dark, the demigodess having orchestrated this on the eve of a new moon. She asked him to take a lone thundercloud, large enough to hold only a single bolt of lightning, and to find and hit the only other cloud in the sky. Fletch couldn't help but grin. He enjoyed a challenge, and one issued by the co-ruler of Equestria? He couldn't say no. After a minute or two of searching the horizon, his eyes spotted a slow and steady movement in the distance. It was too dark to see the details of the cloud itself, but he could tell by the way it moved where it was. He took aim, taking his time and waiting for everything to line up perfectly. He fired. A brilliant white bolt of lightning streaked across the sky, illuminating a vast swath of the land for a moment, visible for many miles. The bolt tore through the sky and hit its mark, blasting the other cloud apart as a fire hose would a tissue paper. The princess was left amazed at this feat. It must have been easier to throw a game of horseshoes blindfolded than to pull this off. With that Luna made him the offer. “Lunar Guard? Is that like the Royal Guard?” he asked, confused. “IT IS PART OF THE ROYAL GUARD, BUT NOT AS YOU WOULD KNOW IT,” the princess replied. “I don't know, there are all these rules-” he began. “THAT ARE QUITE DIFFERENT FROM OUR OWN” she interrupted. Fletch stood there, mulling it over for a moment. Luna put on a devious smirk, whispering to him, or rather speaking with typical volume for a change, “Sizable pay raise, near complete access to the castle, free food, free shelter, out of view of the public,” she tempted. He was sweating now. She had him. “And. No. Reporters.” Fletch raised his eyebrow. “What's the catch?” he asked. The blue alicorn laughed. “Well when you're wearing your armor your coat and mane will change colors, your wings will become batlike, and your eyes will become like those of a dragon and able to see in the night as if it were day.” “That doesn't sound so bad” “The eyes don't change back.” “Ah.” he said. Still, his mind was made up. “Alright, your highness, I'll do it.” As Luna walked out of the stuffy white “dungeon”, Maria asked her. “What do you want me to do with the changeling?” The alicorn looked at her and smiled. “What changeling?” she asked, not slowing down. Maria was confused but dropped the subject for another question. “What are you going to do now?” Luna replied simply, “throw a dog a bone.” “Cryptic,” Maria complained to herself walking back to the cell where Cocoon was kept. She gasped. “What happened?”