Luna found her way into Canterlot a bit easier than she had hoped. She casted a flare with her magic as she approached the pockmarked walls and the crumbling mess of towers that was once Canterlot. Not a single warning quarrel, hail or even sign of movement came from the ramparts as she descended past them into the streets below. She landed at the train station. Luna squinted, trying to adjust her eyes to the dark. All the more reason to be suspicious. Luna was more than just nocturnal, she was the deity which controlled the night, a darkness even she couldn’t see through shouldn’t be, is not natural. Her horn glowed casting a cone of light in the direction she faced.
The tunnel in front of the railway was caved in. It was fortunate for her that she had the ability to fly, some ponies aren’t as lucky . She scanned the rest of the railroad, her eyes falling upon the locomotive which traveled the tracks. It was knocked on it’s side, laying parallel to the tracks. It would have been much more messy if it was an accident on the train’s side. Large circular holes were cut into the passenger compartment. she peered inside one of the holes.
-----------------------------------------------------”Lulu?”-------------------------------------------------------------
The royal sisters stood on the outskirts of ponyville and listened on as an excited, well dressed stallion clamored on about how his invention would revolutionize equestria. Behind him another stallion and a mare pumped on a hoofcar propelling it on a circular railway to demonstrate its effectiveness.
“... What do you think of it Lulu? I can’t keep up with him.” Celestia whispered.
“It’s amazing Tia, take a moment think of how far we can expand our borders with a device like this, and not to mention how the citizenry will rejoice!”
Celestia “hmmmm’d” in confusion, but a mischievous smile on her face belied something else. Luna knew her sister couldn’t help being as excited as her, after all, Celestia was a political beast while she was a master logistician and they both tended not to-
“I bet we could go faster than them.” Celestia’s words cut off Luna’s thinking
“What?” was the only response Luna could come up with. Celestia giggled a moment before ordering the two ponies working the hoofcar to disembark, she then grabbed Luna by the hoof and began pulling her to the car.
“C’mon Lulu it looks like fun!” she said nodding towards the car. The well dressed stallion ended his tirade rather suddenly and looked on in utter bemusement. Luna’s cheeks flushed red with embarrassment. Here was her sister, the most powerful being on the planet besides her, giggling and pulling on her hoof like a filly going to a fair for the first time. It was mortifying, and despite that, Luna couldn’t help but smile.
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Luna shook her head, pushing out the pointless memory. Nothing noteworthy was found in the train besides discarded luggage.
Luna focused her attention inwards towards the rest of the city, she would have to walk, the unnatural darkness surrounding Canterlot would make it almost impossible to spot anything from the sky. So luna began her trot down the somber streets of a rainy Canterlot. The city itself carried a sense of wrongness that superseded everything outside, It did not share the sense of abandonment that most villages she passed over did but instead it showed the signs of decimation. Large swathes of buildings seemed to have been swept to the side splaying the gutted remains of buildings along the roads and alleyways. It was not unlike an infant threw a tantrum with his building blocks.
This caused Luna to make detours many times on the way to the royal palace and as she continued she noted more and more the obvious signs of combat. Spears laid discarded next to dented and broken sets of armor, and among the wreckage she also found multiple shards of a hard black material. She picked up a piece and scrutinized it.
“Carapace…” Luna thought to herself. “Was this the fault of the Changelings?” She believed that to be the answer at first. But it didn’t quite fit with the picture, changelings were surgical, precise, they’d never fight a prolonged battle unless they had the overwhelming advantage, and their mastery over telekinetic magic was subpar at best. It wouldn’t be logical for them to scatter buildings like this. “Perhaps they had assistance?” Luna discarded the chitinous shell and put a hoof to her forehead. It felt as if she was trying to put together some puzzle she didn’t have all the pieces to. She decided that it was useless to guess at what happened without clues and decided to continue.
Luna emerged from an alleyway only to arrive in front of a massive building, a rusted fence surrounding it. The bars were bent at multiple intervals and the main entrance had one of it’s gates barely hanging off a single hinge while the other was completely torn off, laying in the street that separated the alley and the building. A sign hung above the entrance, mostly destroyed. It read:
“CELEST A S CHOOL OR G FTED UNIC RNS”
Both sides of the street seemed to be blockaded with makeshift barricades, and being the first building of note she’s come across, Luna decided that she might find clues here. As she approached the school she scanned over it with her light, the entrances seemed to have been blocked off by piled up junk but there were plenty of broken windows and holes to enter through. While casually running the illumination spell across the building she spotted something, something red. She quickly refocused her attention on that part of the wall. What she saw disturbed her.
“EQUESTRIA DIED SCREAMING” Those three words in blood red were graffitied across the wall, accompanied by a stylized image of a sun, her sister’s cutie mark. Luna’s blood ran cold and she could have sworn her heart may have stopped for a second. Did her subjects truly believe that they were going to be wiped out? Did they believe that her sister would simply fall, that she would let everything her, they worked on for thousands of years be taken away in the span of one? Were they right...?
Luna had enough of this, she charged inside the building. She was tired and she was done with this. She would have answers even if it meant tearing this city's dead heart out to find them.