//------------------------------// // Above it all // Story: Crystal heart // by A pensive Squirrel //------------------------------// Canterlot glittered under the sun Empress’s golden gift. Below, the chiefly unicorn populous enjoyed the entrées of restaurants dotted about the cityscape. Love struck couples wined and dined in the lux of the fortress impaled upon the huge apogee of MT Cantus. Great cataracts spilled from the bluffs and carried the sewage away from the sweet smelling superficiality of the golden gabled, patchwork painted idyll. Indeed, all might seem calm, and at rest, but there was no such dormancy in the sky spiting tower above. Luna paced and her sister yawned, they were growing weary of the Arcady in the north. Luna lashed out at the stained glass window and shattered it into millions of pieces. Celestia didn’t look away from her book. She was a fastidious thing. “Brother will be here tomorrow and we still have nothing to show for this campaign. He will not surrender his kingdom! He is nearly as stubborn as you!” Celestia cocked an eyebrow and made a rotten face at Luna from behind her book. “Who is as stubborn as me?” “Sombra, that bigoted idiot stuck in his archaic world. I’ve been mocking them in their dreams, trying to make them snap. His people are strong. They are doughty and strong willed.” Celestia left her bed; more a sun-kissed cloud draped in many expensive rugs, and fixed the window with ease. “Oh please, sister, don’t lose your tiara over it. You have oodles of time to destroy them, leave them as blithering wrecks. Do so, and Sombra will admit defeat, and Empyrean will have his victory.” Luna’s face creased with displeasure. She stomped upon the monochromatic tiles until a divot formed. “I push him to the brink. I broadcast the filthy secrets of his daughter, and still he defies us? I agree, he is resolute and his subjects would be highly valued for subjugation under our new ethos. He cannot be broken, sister. For every mortifying memory I drag up, his insipid witch queen consoles him.” “You speak of the last crystal pony, do you not?” “Yes, my sister. She evades us. She is watchful of our presence.” “She sees you when you are haunting? There are many things I do not know of these relics. It’s said that their race were the howling wendingo that nearly bought about eternal frost. All I see is a tired old mare with an impotent mate.” Luna picked a grape from the vine, one held by the steward. The stallion complimented the Empress on her elegance and poise, but she was far too taken aback by the sleepless mare. “Make yourself useful, worm. With the absence of the mages to receive news, they will likely resort to the telegraphy of dragons. Round up the wild specimens and even the ones kept in slavery and see that they are not selling our strategies or any information to the Diamond Kingdom.” “Your holiness, I would, but it seems inhumane to belittle and torture the drakes further.” “I did not stutter, worm.” Luna hissed. Celestia procured the bunch of grapes and the perfectly yellow plantains and towed them under her bed, since the two were pontificating in Celestia’s room. “Please, your grace, see sense. Your sister’s judgement is clouded…” “You pustule, how do you see yourself worthy to subvert my name? Get to your appointed task, worm, or there will no longer be space for you here.” “Empress Celestia, I beg of you…” “Don’t bring me into this. I might sit and watch, depends on what other entertainment I can find.” The guard launched his helmet against the doorframe with a sudden burst of light, and a sudden lapse of thought. He busied himself with unbuckling the golden peytral and letting it fall to the ground. “I am the head of your elite guard, and I find myself being bullied and downtrodden. As always your wish is my command, and I will convey the order to the stallions I outrank. The dragons will be caged by tomorrow morning. I will forbid my inferiors from sleeping tonight in aid of this. Goodnight.” The guard left his removed plates of bard in the threshold and conformably shut the ostentatious doors on his exit. “Tsk, what a drama queen? So, where were we?” Celestia giggled. She lay back on her bed and savoured a juicy grape. It hung on to her lip for an age. “Your regalement of equestria lore has in no sense of the word helped me. How can we get through to that empty-skulled abomination?” Celestia didn’t seem at all bothered by the complications in her and her sibling’s plans. She facilely stretched out on her vast bed and digested the thought of the hectares of land that would be hers very soon. “Okay. You sleep dear sister, I will take charge. They all resist our power. Sappheire must die. I’ll force her suicide. That will work. It should…” “If you are going to talk to yourself till the wee hours of the morrow, could you leave? Not a question, I’m telling you; leave.” Luna screwed her face up at her older sister and took a brisk exit through the open balcony. The colds of the north were given only a season to play. Once far enough away from her sister’s arrogance, Luna perched upon the highest point on the tallest tower of the citadel. She looked down at the clean shapes of opulence and then stared at the bowing head of the sun. It was on its way to bed, like Salem soon would be. At the apex she watched in sweet anticipation, sweating so copiously the evening was moist. She felt the cool of a kind breeze brush through her ghostly hair. It nearly tipped her but she wasn’t scared. Her eyes boiled white as she called in the night. “Your military misfit will be the chink in your armour. I may not be able to derail you, but your inebriate will prove a willing host.” Luna quietly whispered to herself. She disappeared in the blink of an eye and arrived seconds later in the gallery leading to the King’s quarters. She would hound him first. He was a tough nut to crack so she needed to set aside extra time to properly panic him. She fazed through the door ordinary in comparison to the one barricading the room of her sister, and crept along the floorboards in a manner most stomach churning and clandestine. At the balcony unmoving was the sleepless queen of the Kingdom. She was in deep mediation. She exuded calmness. It was out of place amongst the havoc, the mania. Luna’s bold physique faded until barely seen. She looked down at the drawling monarch and turned the key. Inside it was the void once more. Salem’s inner self was sitting in silence in the centre. He wasn’t crying. He wasn’t laughing. It was somewhere in between. She approached him unperturbed. “You found our scout then?” Salem turned and smiled evilly at the apparition. “He was a liability long before you sunk your claws into him.” “What will be the punishment for this heresy?” “He is captive now. He’s no heretic. He’s just greedy, confused, scared, like I would be if I didn’t know what was happening. Naturally there will be upheaval. He’ll stand trial in the morning.” Salem gave the unwelcome mare an unsettling stare. Behind her, he could see the darkness, the emptiness becoming vulgar. What once the opaque illusion of the unknown, became steeped in blood. It ran down the sides of the imagined dome until it began to spread along the moody floor. “This trick you play, should I be frightened? Your trick with the wolf’s bane killed a filly, a young one at that. Tell me, ghost, is this what you wanted?” Luna rubbed the side of her head with her hoof, knocking her curving crown to the ensanguine depths of her creation. She nodded her head from side to as if trying to retrace her movements over the previous days. “Actually, that’s news to me. It might have been something my sister cooked up. She can be a wily old nag when she wants to be. I kind of wish I had come up with it. I bet she suffered till she drew her last undeserved breath.” “Have you been on speaking terms with your prodigious brother? I’m sure he misses your soothing voice.” “Condescend to me not, mortal. We are a close family and we keep nothing from each other. What about your litter, how have they been keeping? Did Sierra’s innermost obsessions not repulse you?” Luna punctuated her most gruelling attempt by making an effigy in the image of Sierra, every last detail exact and accurate. “That whore will feel my wrath as all of you will. Will you still love her when she flies the coop? It’s bound to happen. Your eldest fell head over fetlock in love with a commoner, one not fit to shovel shit!” “Stop this! I won’t hear it!” “I’ll be watching in rapture as your precious baby fornicates with multiple partners, partakes in drug taking, when she disobeys you. She won’t be little Sierra anymore. Witness as she transforms, knowing there’s not a damn thing you can do to help her.” The demonstration was brutal. Metal rings pierced Sierra’s ears, snout, brow and other places better left for the imagination. Salem couldn’t look away. She had found yet another missed stitch in his Kingdom’s fabric, one she meant to unpick. Slowly the suspended mare was vandalised by needle ink, tattoos of obscenities, visceral skulls and intricate spiralling thorns and barbs scarring permanently her innocent flesh. Her eyes once alive with youth and vitality were dull, clouded and shrunken. A scene began to form around her. It was a sad looking hallway in an intercity hostel of some kind. She was slumped against the wall, a sack of garbage to her right. The refuse looked more sentient than her. Empty bottles piled up on the landing. Her horn was chipped and beginning to swell from infection. She was shaking like a leaf. “What is this?!” Salem begged as he tried to look away, to close his eyes. He could not avoid the composition. “You can’t turn away because this is reality, her reality. When you disown her to save face amongst your contemporaries, she will fall onto a slippery slope which only ever gets steeper. There is no bottom. Do you want your darling daughter to go through all of that?” “I’d never abandon her. Whatever she chooses, whichever path she follows, I will support…” “You kid right? Your mulishness will be what sends her over the edge. Our prison will become the crucible of her ruination. It’s simply delicious.” Salem struggled free of the encapsulating fear that froze him and darted towards his steadily weakening daughter. He leapt through the figment of his imagination and landed in the boiling blood beneath him. He slid until he was facing the apparition again. She was delighted. “We’ve tried to haggle with you. We have tried. You can’t say we didn’t try. We have been benevolent and divine. You are the demon we sought to slay. You may have the gift of the gab and be able to curry favour with the vermin of this cess pit, but your card is marked. Tomorrow our treaty ends. The shields will fall and you with them.” Luna let the tape roll. She left the head of Salem in the same condition she had found it, jumbled. She got a kick out of watching him roll in difficult sleep and even remained when he woke, sweat pouring down his muzzle. Sappheire had returned to the bedside unbeknownst to the midnight intruder. She comforted her husband for he was a mess. She then looked directly at Luna. She stayed that way until Salem fell back onto his goose-down mattress and curled up into the foetal position, falling back to sleep. “Spirit of the night, you are wasted here. We will not be bludgeoned by your filthy trick. You are a clown, and one with no audience. Everyone rejoices in the sunlit summers and dew drip mornings, and they sleep when you take over. Scurry back to your big sister, Luna. This Kingdom is diamond, and she will not crack.” Luna drifted down to the floor and smacked her lips. Sappheire’s interest had left her parched. She went to the balcony where often Salem’s bride would sulk, and gazed dreamily over the quiet rolling hills and pastures drying, dead. “Positively enthralling, Sappheire. You should write literature. I am no dunce. I can see that he’s not crying from my teasing anymore. You have thousands of individual minds, dreams to observe, fears to feast upon. Goodnight. Oh wait, you don’t sleep do you? Stale old witch…” Luna hopped over the railing of etched mahogany and hurtled towards the courtyard below. She was untraceable after that, just a voice in the mist. How words could control us.